________________________________________________
_ Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore
a special significance in her approaching her husband one evening
after dinner with a copy of the _New York Investigator_ in her hand.
Her expression lent solemnity to the act: Mrs. Linyard had a limited
but distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did
when the President of the University came to dine.
"You didn't tell me of this, Samuel," she said in a slightly
tremulous voice.
"Tell you of what?" returned the Professor, reddening to the margin
of his baldness.
"That you had published a book--I might never have heard of it if
Mrs. Pease hadn't brought me the paper."
Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan. "Oh, you would have
heard of it," he said gloomily.
Mrs. Linyard stared. "Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?" And
as he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride: "Perhaps
you don't know what beautiful things have been said about it."
He took the paper with a reluctant hand. "Has Pease been saying
beautiful things about it?"
"The Professor? Mrs. Pease didn't say he had mentioned it."
The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harviss had
prophesied, had caught the autumn market: had caught and captured
it. The publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced
strategist. He had completely surrounded the enemy. Every newspaper,
every periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of "The Vital
Thing." Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his
lines of attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the
coming work had appeared first in the scientific and literary
reviews, spreading thence to the supplements of the daily journals.
Not a moment passed without a quickening touch to the public
consciousness: seventy millions of people were forced to remember at
least once a day that Professor Linyard's book was on the verge of
appearing. Slips emblazoned with the question: _Have you read "The
Vital Thing"?_ fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened
the floors of crowded street-cars. The query, in large lettering,
assaulted the traveller at the railway bookstall, confronted him on
the walls of "elevated" stations, and seemed, in its ascending
scale, about to supplant the interrogations as to soap and
stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.
On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his
laboratory. The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and
his one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they
heralded. A reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if
Harviss's cheque had sufficed to buy up the first edition of "The
Vital Thing" the Professor would gladly have devoted it to that
purpose. But the sense of inevitableness gradually subdued him, and
he received his wife's copy of the _Investigator_ with a kind of
impersonal curiosity. The review was a long one, full of extracts:
he saw, as he glanced over them, how well they would look in a
volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author
"for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism,
of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too
long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism....
It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders come to us
not from the moralist but from the man of science--when from the
desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious
cry of faith and reconstruction."
The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss's
diplomacy, it had been given to the _Investigator's_ "best man," and
the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his
emancipated fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling
they made up admirably as truths, and their author began to
understand Harviss's regret that they should be used for any less
profitable purpose.
The _Investigator_, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the
other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical
man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than
to secure an expert to "do" the book afresh. But it was evident that
the Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the
profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried
the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something
noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the
achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which
had started with such headway on.
"All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen," he said
with a touch of professional pride. "I knew you'd struck the right
note--I knew they'd be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco. Good
as fiction? It's better--it'll keep going longer."
"Will it?" said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned
to an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's persistency
frightened him.
"I should say so! Why, you fit in everywhere--science, theology,
natural history--and then the all-for-the-best element which is so
popular just now. Why, you come right in with the How-to-Relax
series, and they sell way up in the millions. And then the book's so
full of tenderness--there are such lovely things in it about flowers
and children. I didn't know an old Dryasdust like you could have
such a lot of sentiment in him. Why, I actually caught myself
snivelling over that passage about the snowdrops piercing the frozen
earth; and my wife was saying the other day that, since she's read
'The Vital Thing,' she begins to think you must write the
'What-Cheer Column,' in the _Inglenook."_ He threw back his head with
a laugh which ended in the inspired cry: "And, by George, sir, when
the thing begins to slow off we'll start somebody writing against
it, and that will run us straight into another hundred thousand."
And as earnest of this belief he drew the Professor a supplementary
cheque. _
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