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Page 24
And after he had examined me in some detail touching that house of
entertainment, 'Yes,' he said, 'then, if you will bespeak a room for
me there, I'll come to-morrow and stop for a week or ten days.'
'A week or ten days?' I questioned.
'I can't spare more than a fortnight. I must be back in town by the
20th.'
'But what can you hope to learn of Latin Quarter customs in a
fortnight? One ought to live here for a year, at the very least,
before attempting to write us up.'
'Ah,' he rejoined, shaking his head and gazing dreamily at something
invisible beyond the smoky atmosphere of the caf�, 'a man with
dramatic insight can learn as much in a fortnight as an ordinary
person in half a lifetime. Intuition and inspiration take the place of
the note-book and the yard-stick. The author of _The Merchant of
Venice_ had never visited Italy. In "Crispin Dorr" I have described a
tempest and a shipwreck at which old sailors shudder: and my longest
voyage has been from Holyhead to Kingstown. Besides,' he added, with a
bow and smile, 'for the Latin Quarter, if you will take me under your
protection, I shall, I am sure, benefit by the services of a capital
cicerone.'
And the next afternoon he arrived. I met him at the threshold of the
hotel, introduced him to our landlady, Madame Pamparagoux (who stared
rather wildly, not being accustomed to see her lodgers so medi�vally
attired), and showed him upstairs to the room I had engaged.
There he invited me to be seated while he unpacked his portmanteau and
put his things in order. These, I noticed, were un-Britishly few and
simple. I could discern no vestiges of either sponge or tub. As he
moved backwards and forwards between his chest of drawers and
dressing-table, he would cast frequent affectionate glances at his
double, now in the glass of the _armoire_, now in that above the
chimney. He was favouring me meantime with a running monologue of an
autobiographical complexion.
'I am a self-educated man. My father was a wine merchant in Leeds. At
sixteen he put me to serve in the shop of a cousin, a print-seller. It
was there, I think, that my literary instincts awoke. I contributed
occasional art notes to a local paper. At twenty I came up to London
and began my definite career, as a reporter. I was soon earning thirty
shillings a week, which seemed to me magnificent. But I aspired to
higher things. I felt within me the stirrings of what I could not help
believing to be genius--true genius. I longed to distinguish myself,
to emerge from the crowd, from the background, to make myself
remarked, to do something, to be somebody, to see my name a famous
one. I was fortunate enough at this epoch to attract the notice of
X----, the poet. He believed in me, and encouraged me to believe in
myself. It is one of the regrets of my life that he died before I had
achieved my celebrity. However, I have achieved it. My name is a
household word wherever the English language is read. I have written
the only novels of my time that are sure to live. They will live not
only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality
they possess which I must call _universal_--a quality which appeals
with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for
them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy
to-day. I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems. The
novel,' he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights,
'the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the
drama was that of Shakespeare's, the epic of Homer's. Do you follow
me? Ah, here is a copy of "Crispin Dorr"--here is "The Card Dealer."
Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished. Being
author's copies, they possess an exceptional value. This is my
autograph upon the fly-leaf. This is a photograph of my wife. She is a
good woman, but has no great literary culture, and we are not so happy
together as I could wish. Men of commanding parts seldom make good
husbands, and I committed the imprudence of marrying very young. My
wife, you see, belongs to that class of society from which I have
risen. I am the son of a wine merchant, yet I dine with peers, and
have been favoured with smiles from peeresses. My wife has not kept
pace with me. This is my little girl--our only child--my daughter
Judith. Here is the _Illustrated Gazette_ with the portrait of
myself.'
Some of us in the Latin Quarter found the man's egotism insupportable,
and gave him a wide berth. Others, more numerous, among them the
irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would
exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into
more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not
laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal
their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.
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