Page:The Collector by May Sinclair.djvu/2

322 In the beginning she had no trouble in getting hold of him; it was far easier than her first triumph, the capture of Ford Lankester. As you know, Watt Gunn's greatness dropped on him suddenly, after he had been toiling for eight years in obscurity. Nobody, he said, was more surprised at it than himself. For eight years he had been writing things every bit as good as "The New Aspasia" without getting himself discovered. He was the son of a little draper at Surbiton, and had worked for eight years as his father's cashier. He used to say mournfully that he supposed his "grand mistake" was not going in for journalism. It wasn't his grand mistake; it was his grand distinction, his superhuman luck. It kept him turning out one masterpiece after another, all fresh, with the dew on them, at an age when the talent of most novelists begins to turn gray. It kept him pure from any ulterior motive, Above all, it kept him from the clutches of the collector.

But it had this disadvantage, that when he did emerge, he emerged in a state of utter innocence, as naked of sophistication as when he was born. He had no suspicion of the dangers that lurked for him in Mrs. Folyat-Raikes's drawing-room. He did n't know that there were two kinds of celebrities, those who were too small to be asked there, and those who were too big to go. There was nobody to tell him that he was much too big. He went because he understood that he would meet the sort of people he had wanted all his life to meet.

He met first of all Furnival and me. It was touching how from the very first, and afterward in his extremity, he clung to us. Positively, it was as if then, before he had lost bis crystalline simplicity, he had had some premonition of disaster, and felt subconsciously that we might save him. But it went, that pure and savage sense of his, in his first year.

I can see him now, sitting beside Mrs. Folyat-Raikes at the head of her beautiful mahogany table always impeccably dressed, bright eyed, and a little flushed, I can see his hair,—he had never trained it,—which rose irrepressibly in a crest or comb from back to front along the top of his head, and his innocent mustache, which drooped as if it deprecated the behavior of his hair. I can see his shy, untutored courtliness, his jerky aplomb, his little humorous, interrogative air, which seemed to say, "I 'm carrying it off pretty well for a chap that is n't used to it—my greatness, eh?" I seem to hear his guileless intonations; I follow, fascinated, the noble, reckless rush of his aitches as they fell through space; I taste the strange and piercing flavor of the accents that were his.

It seemed to me horrible, inconceivable, that he liked being there. And yet there can be no doubt that he did like it just at first. It gave him the things that he had missed, the opportunities. It satisfied his everlasting curiosity as to contemporary manners and the social scene. And just at first it did n't hurt him. He continued to produce, with a humor and a freshness unimpaired, those inimitable annals of his class.

In his second year Watt Gunn had made his way everywhere. He didn't push. He was so frightfully celebrated that he had no need to. He was pushed. The mass bore down on him. Competition had set in. All the collectors in the western and southwestern districts contended with Mrs. Folyat-Raikes for the possession of Watt Gunn. But she held her own, for he was grateful to her. You saw her sweep by, haggard with pursuit, but trailing Watt Gunn on the edge of her sagging, voluminous, Victorian gowns.

It was pitiful to watch the gradual sophistication of the naïf creature, his polishing and hardening under the social impact, and the blunting of his profound and primal instincts. They clipped his wings, among them, and the wings of his wild aitches. Very soon he lost his shyness and his tingling cockney flavor.

Presently his work began to suffer. It was becoming more brilliant, more astoundingly intellectual, but the dewiness and the divine simplicity were going.

We, Grevill Burton, Furnival, and I, told him so.

He knew it, and he knew the cause of it, but he defended himself. When we said, "For God's sake, keep out of it!" he said he could n't.

"I want," he said, "to get the hang of the thing. If I'm going to draw the upper classes, I must see what they're like. I can't invent 'em. Who could?"

And when Furny told him for his good that he was a snob at bottom, he merely said: "Of course I am. Who is n't?"