Chapter 4

WHEN he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for
beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save
that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom
at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary
enterprise.

"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather
white: "he wants to publish heaven knows what about me."

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had
wanted. "Already?" I cried with a sort of sense that my friend had
fled to me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested
the electric headlights of some monstrous modem ship, and I felt as
if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw his
momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the
first in the field. A great interest is naturally felt in Mr.
Paraday's surroundings," he heavily observed.

"I hadn't the least idea of it," said Paraday, as if he had been
told he had been snoring.

"I find he hasn't read the article in THE EMPIRE," Mr. Morrow
remarked to me. "That's so very interesting - it's something to
start with," he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which
were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little
garden. As a "surrounding" I felt how I myself had already been
taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. "I
represent," our visitor continued, "a syndicate of influential
journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public - whose publics,
I may say - are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday's line of
thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views
on the subject of the art he so nobly exemplifies. In addition to
my connexion with the syndicate just mentioned I hold a particular
commission from THE TATLER, whose most prominent department,
'Smatter and Chatter' - I dare say you've often enjoyed it -
attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a
representative of THE TATLER, with the confidence of Guy
Walsingham, the brilliant author of 'Obsessions.' She pronounced
herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went
so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible
even to herself."

Neil Paraday had dropped on the garden-bench and sat there at once
detached and confounded; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn,
as if with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His
movement had been interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to
sink sympathetically into a wicker chair that stood hard by, and
while Mr. Morrow so settled himself I felt he had taken official
possession and that there was no undoing it. One had heard of