The determining cause of his consent was the fact that the book was already in press. The Professor knew little about the workings of the press, but the phrase gave him a sense of finality, of having been caught himself in the toils of that mysterious engine. If he had had time to think the matter over, his scruples might have dragged him back; but his conscience was eased by the futility of resistance.
IV
Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore a special significance in her approaching her husband one evening after dinner with a copy of the New York Investigator in her hand. Her expression lent solemnity to the act: Mrs. Linyard had a limited but distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did when the President of the University came to dine.
“You didn’t tell me of this, Samuel,” she said in a slightly tremulous voice.
“Tell you of what?” returned the Professor, reddening to the margin of his baldness.
“That you had published a book—I might never have heard of it if Mrs. Pease hadn’t brought me the paper.”
Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan. “Oh, you would have heard of it,” he said gloomily.
Mrs. Linyard stared. “Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?” And as he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride: “Perhaps you don’t know what beautiful things have been said about it.”
He took the paper with a reluctant hand. “Has Pease been saying beautiful things about it?”
“The Professor? Mrs. Pease didn’t say he had mentioned it.”
The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harviss had prophesied, had caught the autumn market: had caught and captured it. The publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced strategist. He had completely surrounded the enemy. Every newspaper, every periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of “The Vital Thing.” Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence to the supplements of the daily journals. Not a moment passed without a quickening touch to the public consciousness: seventy millions of people were forced to remember at least once a day that Professor Linyard’s book was on the verge of appearing. Slips emblazoned with the question: Have you read “The Vital Thing”? fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened the floors of crowded street-cars. The query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveller at the railway bookstall, confronted him on the walls of “elevated” stations, and seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations as to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.
On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his laboratory. The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and his one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they heralded. A reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if Harviss’s cheque had sufficed to buy up the first edition of “The Vital Thing” the Professor would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the sense of inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife’s copy of the Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how well they would look in a volume of “Selections.” The reviewer began by thanking his author “for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man’s destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism…. It is well,” the writer continued, “when such reminders come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science—when from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious cry of faith and reconstruction.”
The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss’s diplomacy, it had been given to the Investigator’s “best man,” and the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer’s handling they made up admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss’s regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.
The Investigator, as Harviss phrased it, “set the pace,” and the other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer’s theme than to secure an expert to “do” the book afresh. But it was evident that the Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had started with such headway on.
“All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen,” he said with a touch of professional pride. “I knew you’d struck the right note—I knew they’d be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco. Good as fiction? It’s better—it’ll keep going longer.”
“Will it?” said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned to an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book’s persistency frightened him.
“I should say so! Why, you fit in everywhere—science, theology, natural history—and then the all-for-the-best element which is so popular just now. Why, you come right in with the How-to-Relax series, and they sell way up in the millions. And then the book’s so full of tenderness—there are such lovely things in it about flowers and children. I didn’t know an old Dryasdust like you could have such a lot of sentiment in him. Why, I actually caught myself snivelling over that passage about the snowdrops piercing the frozen earth; and my wife was saying the other day that, since she’s read ‘The Vital Thing,’ she begins to think you must write the ‘What-Cheer Column,’ in the Inglenook.” He threw back his head with a laugh which ended in the inspired cry: “And, by George, sir, when the thing begins to slow off we’ll start somebody writing against it, and that will run us straight into another hundred thousand.”
And as earnest of this belief he drew the Professor a supplementary cheque.
V
Mrs. Linyard’s knock cut short the importunities of the lady who had been trying to persuade the Professor to be taken by flashlight at his study table for the Christmas number of the Inglenook. On this point the Professor had fancied himself impregnable; but the unwonted smile with which he welcomed his wife’s intrusion showed that his defences were weakening.
The lady from the Inglenook took the hint with professional promptness, but said brightly, as she snapped the elastic around her note-book: “I shan’t let you forget me, Professor.”
The groan with which he followed her retreat was interrupted by his wife’s question: “Do they pay you for these interviews, Samuel?”
The Professor looked at her with sudden attention. “Not directly,” he said, wondering at her expression.
She sank down with a sigh. “Indirectly, then?”
“What is the matter, my dear? I gave you Harviss’s second cheque the other day—”
Her tears arrested him. “Don’t be hard on the boy, Samuel! I really believe your success has turned his head.”
“The boy—what boy? My success—? Explain yourself, Susan!”
“It’s only that Jack has—has borrowed some money—which he can’t repay. But you mustn’t think him altogether to blame, Samuel. Since the success of your book he has been asked about so much—it’s given the children quite a different position. Millicent says that wherever they go the first question asked is, ‘Are you any relation of the author of “The Vital Thing”?’ Of course we’re all very proud of the book; but it entails obligations which you may not have thought of in writing it.”