"I!" he thundered.
"He had a beard," she said, in self-defence.
"Who?"
"Oh, I don't know! Please forgive me! I do remember, of course, who you are--I remember too well!" said Mrs. Jerry, generously.
"What is my name?" Tommy demanded.
She put her hands together again, beseechingly. "Please, please!" she said. "I have such a dreadful memory for names, but--oh, please!"
"What am I?" he insisted.
"You are the--the man who invents those delightful thingumbobs," she cried with an inspiration.
"I never invented anything, except two books," said Tommy, looking at her reproachfully.
"I know them by heart," she cried.
"One of them is not published yet," he informed her.
"I am looking forward to it so excitedly," she said at once.
"And my name is Sandys," said he.
"Thomas Sandys," she said, correcting him triumphantly. "How is that dear, darling little Agnes--Elspeth?"
"You have me at last," he admitted.
"'Sandys on Woman!'" exclaimed Mrs. Jerry, all rippling smiles once more. "Can I ever forget it!"
"I shall never pretend to know anything about women again," Tommy answered dolefully, but with a creditable absence of vindictiveness.
"Please, please!" said the little hands again.
"It is a nasty jar, Mrs. Jerry."
"Please!"
"Oh that I could forget so quickly!"
"Please!"
"I forgive you, if that is what you want."
She waved her whip. "And you will come and see me?"
"When I have got over this. It needs--a little time." He really said this to please her.
"You shall talk to me of the new book," she said, confident that this would fetch him, for he was not her first author. "By the way, what is it about?"
"Can you ask, Mrs. Jerry?" replied Tommy, passionately. "Oh, woman, woman, can you ask?"
This puzzled her at the time, but she understood what he had meant when the book came out, dedicated to Pym. "Goodness gracious!" she said to herself as she went from chapter to chapter, and she was very self-conscious when she heard the book discussed in society, which was not quite as soon as it came out, for at first the ladies seemed to have forgotten their Tommy.
But the journals made ample amends. He had invented, they said, something new in literature, a story that was yet not a story, told in the form of essays which were no mere essays. There was no character mentioned by name, there was not a line of dialogue, essays only, they might say, were the net result, yet a human heart was laid bare, and surely that was fiction in its highest form. Fiction founded on fact, no doubt (for it would be ostrich-like to deny that such a work must be the outcome of a painful personal experience), but in those wise and penetrating pages Mr. Sandys called no one's attention to himself; his subject was an experience common to humanity, to be borne this way or that; and without vainglory he showed how it should be borne, so that those looking into the deep waters of the book (made clear by his pellucid style) might see, not the author, but themselves.
A few of the critics said that if the book added nothing to his reputation, it detracted nothing from it, but probably their pen added this mechanically when they were away. What annoyed him more was the two or three who stated that, much as they liked "Unrequited Love," they liked the "Letters" still better. He could not endure hearing a good word said for the "Letters" now.
The great public, I believe, always preferred the "Letters," but among important sections of it the new book was a delight, and for various reasons. For instance, it was no mere story. That got the thoughtful public. Its style, again, got the public which knows it is the only public that counts.
Society still held aloof (there was an African traveller on view that year), but otherwise everything was going on well, when the bolt came, as ever, from the quarter whence it was least expected. It came in a letter from Grizel, so direct as to be almost as direct as this: "I think it is a horrid book. The more beautifully it is written the more horrid it seems.