stared at the pile of letters. He remembered that it was a Saturday—a free day! He groaned at such freedom.
Fame is like the trumpet she bears. The trumpet has for the civilian an exhilarating sound; for the house near barracks, too familiar with it, a mechanical one; for the mounted trooper at reveillée it has nothing but a hideous blare.
Fame had come to Professor Higginson under her less pleasing aspect. He marvelled that so much fame had already risen. He trembled at what The Howl might now raise. A paltry lapse of memory! A thing that might happen to anyone! And now all this!
Professor Higginson had under-estimated his position in the scientific world of guess-work.
There are not many Professors of Psychology. Only three have written books. That his own should have been translated into several languages had in the past given him pleasure, for he was a provincial man, and in that curious mixture which makes your academic fellow the funny thing he is, the enormity of false pride jostles a very real simplicity.
He opened one letter, then another, then another: he intended to answer each laboriously at some length with his own hand. He had said nothing of confidence or of privacy to any man, and these letters were the first-fruits of what might be to come!
The Howl is read by all England before nine. There is a post comes into Ormeston at three in the afternoon. By that post, amid a mass of material which it appalled him to observe, and which included every kind of advertisement from every sort of tout, there was shot at the Philosopher over two hundred letters of more material kind.
He purposed an attempt to answer even these in as much detail as his first batch and with his own hand. His Great Adventure was becoming a matter of appreciable interest to himself, and half to conquer, in some moments, his anxiety and dread. There came interludes—as he sat that afternoon opening envelope after envelope, and scribbling notes for replies—when he really felt as though what he were writing was true, and could describe with glowing precision all that strange psychic phase in which the Sub-Conscious self kicks up its heels and gambols at random unrestrained by the burden of objectivity.
Two letters in particular he wrote with the utmost care. One to a Cabinet Minister—an inveterate meddler who dabbled in such things in the intervals of his enormous occupations—the other to an ex-Cabinet Minister—another inveterate meddler who also dabbled in such things in the intervals of his.
Professor Higginson had never written to such great men before. He worked really hard, and he composed two masterpieces. Upon the addressing of his first ten envelopes he spent the best part of twenty minutes with books of reference at his side. He wrote courteously and at enormous length to a Great Lady whose coronet stood out upon the paper like a mountain, and whose signature he could yet hardly accept as real, so tremendous a thing did it seem to him that such an one as She should have entered his life.
He wrote in extraordinary French to the great Specialist at Nancy who had written to him in English. He wrote in English to the great Specialist of Leipsic who had written to him in a German he did not understand, but whose signature and European name warranted the nature of the reply. So passed all Saturday's leisure.
Then came Sunday morning—and a perfect ocean of post!
It was a mass of correspondence which no two secretaries could have dealt with in thirty-six hours, and which he left hopelessly upon his table until some expert friend might tell him how such heaps were cleared.
His immense work of the day and of the night before in answering the Great had left him weary and already disgusted with his new public position. His terrors returned.
He had overstrained himself. The room was blurred before him. He rose from his breakfast and thought to take the air—but the empty Sabbath streets brought him no relief.
The Sunday Popular Papers were hot on his trail. Their great flaring placards stood outside the news shops.
"Is there a Heaven?" in letters a foot long, and underneath, "Professor Higginson says 'Yes,'" almost knocked him down as they stared at him from one hoarding. In the loud bill outside a chapel he saw his name set forth as the "subject of the discourse," and before he could snatch away his eyes he had caught the phrase: "The First Witness." All were welcome. … He was the First Witness! … Oh, God!