The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(202)

‘No, my dear.’

‘That paper! Why can’t they leave him alone?’

‘You see The Leopard is selling like hot cakes. Dinny, how do things stand now?’

‘I know he’s been having malaria, but I don’t even know where or how he is.’

Michael looked at her face, masked in its desperate little smile, and said hesitatingly:

‘Would you like me to find out?’

‘If he wants me, he knows where I am.’

‘I’ll see Compson Grice. I’m not lucky with Wilfrid himself.’

When she was gone he sat staring at the letters he had not begun to answer, half dismayed, half angered. Poor dear Dinny! What a shame! Pushing the letters aside, he went out.

Compson Grice’s office was near Covent Garden, which, for some reason still to be discovered, attracts literature. When Michael reached it, about noon, that young publisher was sitting in the only well-furnished room in the building, with a newspaper cutting in his hand and a smile on his lips. He rose and said: ‘Hallo, Mont! Seen this in The Phase?’

‘Yes.’

‘I sent it round to Desert, and he wrote that at the top and sent it back. Neat, eh!’

Michael read in Wilfrid’s writing:

‘Whene’er the lord who rules his roosts

Says: “Bite!” he bites, says: “Boost!” he boosts.’





‘He’s in town, then?’

‘Was half an hour ago.’

‘Have you seen him at all?’

‘Not since the book came out.’

Michael looked shrewdly at that comely fattish face. ‘Satisfied with the sales?’

‘We’re in the forty-first thousand, and going strong.’

‘I suppose you don’t know whether Wilfrid is returning to the East?’

‘Haven’t the least little idea.’

‘He must be pretty sick with the whole thing.’

Compson Grice shrugged.

‘How many poets have ever made a thousand pounds out of a hundred pages of verse?’

‘Small price for a soul, Grice.’

‘It’ll be two thousand before we’ve done.’

‘I always thought it a mistake to print ‘The Leopard’. Since he did it I’ve defended it, but it was a fatal thing to do.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Obviously. It’s done you proud.’

‘You can sneer,’ said Grice, with some feeling, ‘but he wouldn’t have sent it to me if he hadn’t wished it to come out. I am not my brother’s keeper. The mere fact that it turns out a scoop is nothing to the point.’

Michael sighed.

‘I suppose not; but this is no joke for him. It’s his whole life.’

‘Again, I don’t agree. That happened when he recanted to save himself being shot. This is expiration, and damned good business into the bargain. His name is known to thousands who’d never heard of it.’

‘Yes,’ said Michael, brooding, ‘there is that, certainly. Nothing like persecution to keep a man alive. Grice, will you do something for me? Make an excuse to find out what Wilfrid’s intentions are. I’ve put my foot into it with him and can’t go myself, but I specially want to know.’

‘H’m!’ said Grice. ‘He bites.’

Michael grinned. ‘He won’t bite his benefactor. I’m serious. Will you?’

‘I’ll try. By the way, there’s a book by that French Canadian I’ve just published. Top-hole! I’ll send you a copy – your wife will like it.’ ‘And,’ he added to himself, ‘talk about it.’ He smoothed back his sleek dark hair and extended his hand. Michael shook it with a little more warmth than he really felt and went away.

‘After all,’ he thought, ‘what is it to Grice except business? Wilfrid’s nothing to him! In these days we have to take what the gods send.’ And he fell to considering what was really making the public buy a book not concerned with sex, memoirs or murders. The Empire! The prestige of the English! He did not believe it. No! What was making them buy it was that fundamental interest which attached to the question how far a person might go to save his life without losing what was called his soul. In other words, the book was being sold by that little thing – believed in some quarters to be dead – called Conscience. A problem posed to each reader’s conscience, that he could not answer easily; and the fact that it had actually happened to the author brought it home to the reader that some awful alternative might at any moment be presented to himself. And what would he do then, poor thing? And Michael felt one of those sudden bursts of consideration and even respect for the public which often came over him and so affected his more intelligent friends that they alluded to him as ‘Poor Michael!’