Plashers Mead Part 40

"Oh, Guy, I adore you so wildly. It must be this year. My darling, my darling, this year ... let it be this year."

Guy doled out very carefully the 35 he had acc.u.mulated by the sale of his books. Lampard and Clary had to be content with 7 apiece. Five more creditors received 4, or rather one of them only 3 19_s_., so that the guinea left over could be put back into the current account for poetic justice. There was, for the present nothing more to do but await the verdict of Worrall's reader, and in a fortnight Guy heard from the publisher to say this had been favorable enough to make Mr. Worrall wish to see him in order to discuss the matter of publication. Guy was much excited and rushed across to the Rectory in a festivity of hopefulness.

He had wired to say he would be in London next day, and all that evening the name of Worrall was lauded until round his unknown personality shone the aureole of a wise and benevolent saint. There seemed no limit to what so discerning a publisher might not do for Guy, and he and Pauline became to themselves and to her family the hero and heroine of such an adventure as never had been. In the course of the evening Guy had an opportunity of talking to Margaret, and for the first time for a long while he availed himself of it.

"Are you really going to talk to me, then?" she asked in mock surprise.

"Margaret, I've been rather objectionable lately," said Guy, remembering with an access of penitence that it must be almost exactly a year ago that he and Margaret in that snowy weather had first talked about his love for Pauline.

"Well, I have thought that you were forgetting me," said Margaret. "I shall be sad if we are never going to be friends again."

"Oh, Margaret, we are friends now. I've been worried, and I thought that you had been rather unkind to Pauline."

"I haven't really."

"Of course not. It was absolutely my fault," Guy admitted. "Now that there seems a chance of our being married in less than ten years, I'm going to give up this continual exasperation in which I live nowadays.

It's curious that my first impression of you all should have been as of a Mozart symphony, so tranquil and gay and self-contained and perfectly made did the Rectory seem. How clumsily I have plunged into that life,"

he sighed. "Really, Margaret, I feel sometimes like a wild beast that's escaped from a menagerie and got into a concert of chamber-music. Look here, you shall never have to grumble at me again. Now tell me, just to show that you've forgiven my detestable irruption ... when Richard comes back...."

Margaret gave him her hand for a moment, and looked down.

"And you're happy?" he asked, eagerly.

"I'm sure I shall be."

"Oh, you will be, you will be."

Pauline asked him afterwards what he had said to Margaret that could have made her so particularly sweet, and when Guy whispered his discovery, Pauline declared that the one thing necessary to make this evening perfect had been just that knowledge.

"Guy, how clever of you to make her tell you what she will never tell us. You don't know how much it has worried me to feel that you were always angry with Margaret. How I've exaggerated everything! And what friends you really are, you dears!"

"I've never been angry with her except on your account."

"But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort of young Miss Verney."

They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London.

Guy was surprised to be kept waiting when he inquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily, that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian ante-chamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step.

It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently.

"Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.

Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a depressing acc.u.mulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy, and the raindrops seemed from inside to smear it as tears smudge the face of a dirty child. The clerk pored over a ledger, and from the gray afternoon the cries of the porters in Covent Garden came drearily in. At last a bell sounded, and the clerk invited him "to step this way,"

lifting the counter and pointing up a narrow staircase beyond a gla.s.s door. Guy went up, and at last entered Mr. Worrall's private office.

The publisher was a short, fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon bore a hole in the festooned ceiling.

"Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher, referring as he spoke to Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of oblivion--"well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favorably on your poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them."

Guy bowed.

"No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a Gothic arch with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added:

"Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion was certainly favorable."

And so it ought to be, thought Guy, for a guinea.

"And I don't think," Mr. Worrall went on, "that in the circ.u.mstances we need be very much afraid. Have you any ideas about the price at which your sheaf, your little harvest is to be offered to the public?"

"Oh, I should leave that to you," said Guy, hastily.

"Precisely," said the publisher. "Yes, I think perhaps we might say five shillings or ... of course it _might_ be done in paper in the Covent Garden Series of Modern English Poets. Yes, the reader speaks most highly of your work. You know the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets?

In paper at half-a-crown net?"

"I should be very proud to appear in such a series," said Guy, pleasantly. The series, as a matter of fact, was one that could do him no discredit.

"It's a charming idea, isn't it?" said Mr. Worrall, fondling one of the set that lay on his desk. "Every five volumes has its own floral emblem.

We've done The Rose, The Lily, The Violet. Let me see, your poems are mostly about London, aren't they?"

"No, there isn't one about London," Guy pointed out, rather sharply.

"No, precisely; then of course they would _not_ come in The London Pride set which still has a vacancy. Perhaps The Cowslip? What does the reader say? Um, yes, pastoral! Precisely! Well, then why not let us decide that your poems shall be Number Three in The Cowslip set. Capital! I think you'd be wise to choose the Covent Garden series in paper. The cost of publication is really less in that series, and I have always chosen my poets so carefully that I can be sure the Press will pay attention to--er neophytes. That is a great advantage for a young writer, as you no doubt realize without my telling you?"

"The cost?" echoed Guy in a puzzled voice.

"It will run you in for about thirty pounds--as a guarantee of course.

The terms I suggest are simply a written agreement that you will guarantee thirty pounds towards the cost. Your royalty to be ten per cent. on the first thousand, twelve and a half on the next thousand, and fifteen over two thousand. We might fairly say that in the event of selling a thousand you would have nothing to pay, but, of course, if you only sell twenty or thirty, you will have to--er--pay for your piping."

"And when should I have to produce this thirty pounds?" Guy asked.

"Well, I might ask for a cheque to be placed to my account on the day of publication; and then, of course, I should send in a written statement twice a year with the usual three months' margin for settlement."

"So that supposing my book came out in March?" Guy inquired.

"By the following November I should hope to have the pleasure of sending you back your thirty pounds and a cheque on account of royalties," said the publisher, briskly.

"They don't seem very good terms, somehow," said Guy.

Mr. Worrall shrugged his shoulders, and his conical head grew more conical.

"You forget the advantage of being in the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets. However, don't, pray do not, intrust your ma.n.u.script to my pilotage unless you are perfectly satisfied. I have a good many poems to consider, you know."

"May I write within a week or so and give you my decision?" Guy asked.

"Naturally."

"Well, good-by."

"Good-by, Mr. Hazlewood. Clever fellow, isn't he?"