Part 16

At last she met my look. “Can you bear to hear it?”

“I think I can bear anything now.”

“Well then, it was really what I wanted to give you an inkling of. It’s largely over you that they’ve quarrelled. Mr. Bousefield wants him to chuck you.”

I grabbed her arm again. “And Limbert won’t?”

“He seems to cling to you. Mr. Bousefield says no magazine can afford you.”

I gave a laugh that agitated the very coachman. “Why, my dear lady, has he any idea of my price?”

“It isn’t your price--he says you’re dear at any price; you do so much to sink the ship. Your ‘Remarks’ are called ‘Occasional,’ but nothing could be more deadly regular: you’re there month after month and you’re never anywhere else. And you supply no public want.”

“I supply the most delicious irony.”

“So Ray appears to have declared. Mr. Bousefield says that’s not in the least a public want. No one can make out what you’re talking about and no one would care if he could. I’m only quoting him, mind.”

“Quote, quote--if Limbert holds out. I think I must leave you now, please: I must rush back to express to him what I feel.”

“I’ll drive you to his door. That isn’t all,” said Mrs. Highmore. And on the way, when the carriage had turned, she communicated the rest. “Mr. Bousefield really arrived with an ultimatum: it had the form of something or other by Minnie Meadows.”

“Minnie Meadows?” I was stupefied.

“The new lady-humourist every one is talking about. It’s the first of a series of screaming sketches for which poor Ray was to find a place.”

“Is that Mr. Bousefield’s idea of literature?”

“No, but he says it’s the public’s, and you’ve got to take some account of the public. Aux grands maux les grands remèdes. They had a tremendous lot of ground to make up, and no one would make it up like Minnie. She would be the best concession they could make to human weakness; she would strike at least this note of showing that it was not going to be quite all--well, all you. Now Ray draws the line at Minnie; he won’t stoop to Minnie; he declines to touch, to look at Minnie. When Mr. Bousefield--rather imperiously, I believe--made Minnie a sine quâ non of his retention of his post he said something rather violent, told him to go to some unmentionable place and take Minnie with him. That of course put the fat on the fire. They had really a considerable scene.”

“So had he with the Beacon man,” I musingly replied. “Poor dear, he seems born for considerable scenes! It’s on Minnie, then, that they’ve really split?” Mrs. Highmore exhaled her despair in a sound which I took for an assent, and when we had rolled a little further I rather in-consequently and to her visible surprise broke out of my reverie. “It will never do in the world--he must stoop to Minnie!”

“It’s too late--and what I’ve told you still isn’t all. Mr. Bousefield raises another objection.”

“What other, pray?”

“Can’t you guess?”

I wondered. “No more of Ray’s fiction?”

“Not a line. That’s something else no magazine can stand. Now that his novel has run its course Mr. Bousefield is distinctly disappointed.”

I fairly bounded in my place. “Then it may do?”

Mrs. Highmore looked bewildered. “Why so, if he finds it too dull?”

“Dull? Ralph Limbert? He’s as fine as a needle!”

“It comes to the same thing--he won’t penetrate leather. Mr. Bousefield had counted on something that would, on something that would have a wider acceptance. Ray says he wants iron pegs.” I collapsed again; my flicker of elation dropped to a throb of quieter comfort; and after a moment’s silence I asked my neighbour if she had herself read the work our friend had just put forth. “No,” she replied, “I gave him my word at the beginning, on his urgent request, that I wouldn’t.”

“Not even as a book?”

“He begged me never to look at it at all. He said he was trying a low experiment. Of course I knew what he meant and I entreated him to let me just for curiosity take a peep. But he was firm, he declared he couldn’t bear the thought that a woman like me should see him in the depths.”

“He’s only, thank God, in the depths of distress,” I replied. “His experiment’s nothing worse than a failure.”