Alice Galleon left them together. Peter could say nothing at all. He stood there, shifting from foot to foot, white, absolutely tongue-tied.
She felt his embarrassment and struggled.
“I hear that you've been very ill, Mr. Westcott. I'm so dreadfully sorry and I do hope that you're better?”
“Your book is out, isn't it? 'Reuben Hallard' is the name. I must get father to put it down on his list. One's first books must be so dreadfully exciting--and so alarming ... the reviews and everything--what is it about?”
“Cornwall? How delightful! I was only there once. Mullion. Do you know Mullion?” She struggled along. The pain that had begun in his heart was now at his throat--his throat was full of spiders' webs. He could scarcely see her in the dark but her pale blue dress and her dark eyes and her beautiful white hands--her little figure danced against the dark, shining floor like a fairy's.
He heard her sigh of relief at Alice Galleon's return.
“Oh! thank you, dear, so much. Good-bye, Mr. Westcott--I shall read the book.”
“Lights! Lights!” cried Alice Galleon. “How provoking of her not to come to tea properly. Well, Peter? How was it all?”
He burst from the room without a word and banged, desperately, the door behind him.
A CHAPTER ABOUT SUCCESS I HOW TO WIN IT, HOW TO KEEP IT--WITH A NOTE AT THE END FROM HENRY GALLEON
The shout of applause with which “Reuben Hallard” was greeted still remains one of the interesting cases in modern literary history. At this time of day it all seems ancient and distant enough; the book has been praised, blamed, lifted up, hurled down a thousand times, and has finally been discovered to be a book of promise, of natural talent, with a great deal of crudity and melodrama and a little beauty. It does not stand of course in comparison with Peter Westcott's later period and yet it has a note that his hand never captured afterwards. How incredibly bad it is in places, the Datchett incidents, with their flames and screams and murder in the dark, sufficiently betray: how fine it can be such a delight as The Cherry Orchard chapter shows, and perhaps the very badness of the crudities helped in its popularity, for there was nothing more remarkable about it than the fashion in which it captured every class of reader. But its success, in reality, was a result of the exact moment of its appearance. Had Peter waited a thousand years he could not possibly have chosen a time more favourable. It was that moment in literary history, when the world had had enough of lilies and was turning, with relief, to artichokes. There was a periodical of this time entitled _The Green Volume_. This appeared somewhere about 1890 and it brought with it a band of young men and women who were exceedingly clever, saw the quaintness of life before its reality and stood on tiptoe in order to observe things that were really growing quite close to the ground. This quarterly produced some very admirable work; its contributors were all, for a year or two, as clever as they were--young and as cynical as either. The world was dressed in a powder puff and danced beneath Chinese lanterns and was as wicked as it could be in artificial rose-gardens. It was all great fun for a year or two....