“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 expenses up to a reasonable figure,” Callan reassured me.
“It’ll be a good joke for a time,” I said. “I’m infinitely obliged to you.”
He warded off my thanks with both hands.
“I’ll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept,” he said, rising. He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes with red capital letters of the alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small letters. There was a writing-lamp that cast an æsthetic glow upon another appropriate attitude—and there was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and another with MS. paper already in position.
“My God!” I thought—“to these heights the Muse soars.”
As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty. I thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters, and dust everywhere. And I knew that my attitude—when I sat at it—would be inappropriate.
Callan was ticking off the telegram upon his machine. “It will go in the morning at eight,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
To encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proof-sheets of his next to read in bed. The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of him and his jobs. I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to read myself to sleep with it. I was under obligations to old Cal and I wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a sort of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great Moral Purpose loomed in the background. It would have been a dully readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable. It was amazing that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have the impudence. He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It revolted me more than a little.
I came to it out of a different plane of thought. I may not have been able to write then—or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too, must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan had begun very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in his youth and had starved a little. It was rather trying to think that perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back upon. It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors settled down upon me.
I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed to meet Callan’s eye. It was as if he must be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he must think me a fool who quarrelled with my victuals. He gave no signs of any such knowledge—was dignified, cordial; discussed his breakfast with gusto, opened his letters, and so on. An anæmic amanuensis was taking notes for appropriate replies. How could I tell him that I would not do the work, that I was too proud and all the rest of it? He would have thought me a fool, would have stiffened into hostility, I should have lost my last chance. And, in the broad light of day, I was loath to do that.
He began to talk about indifferent things; we glided out on to a current of mediocre conversation. The psychical moment, if there were any such, disappeared.
Someone bearing my name had written to express an intention of offering personal worship that afternoon. The prospect seemed to please the great Cal. He was used to such things; he found them pay, I suppose. We began desultorily to discuss the possibility of the writer’s being a relation of mine; I doubted. I had no relations that I knew of; there was a phenomenal old aunt who had inherited the acres and respectability of the Etchingham Grangers, but she was not the kind of person to worship a novelist. I, the poor last of the family, was without the pale, simply because I, too, was a novelist. I explained these things to Callan and he commented on them, found it strange how small or how large, I forget which, the world was. Since his own apotheosis shoals of Callans had claimed relationship.
I ate my breakfast. Afterward, we set about the hatching of that article—the thought of it sickens me even now. You will find it in