The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/John Delavoy/Chapter 8
VIII
The first use I made of our rebound was to say with intensity: 'What will you do if he does?'
'Does publish the picture?' There was an instant charm to me in the privacy of her full collapse and the sudden high tide of our common defeat. 'What can I? It's all very well; but there's nothing to be done. I want never to see him again. There's only something,' she went on, 'that you can do.'
'Prevent him?—get it back? I'll do, be sure, my utmost; but it will be difficult without a row.'
'What do you mean by a row?' she asked.
'I mean it will be difficult without publicity. I don't think we want publicity.'
She turned this over. 'Because it will advertise him?'
'His magnificent energy. Remember what I just now told him. He's the right side.'
'And we're the wrong!' she laughed. 'We mustn't make that known—I see. But, all the same, save my sketch!'
I held her hands. 'And if I do?'
'Ah, get it back first!' she answered, ever so gently and with a smile, but quite taking them away.
I got it back, alas! neither first nor last; though indeed at the end this was to matter, as I thought and as I found, little enough. Mr. Beston rose to his full height and was not to abate an inch even on my offer of another article on a subject notoriously unobjectionable. The only portrait of John Delavoy was going, as he had said, to take, and nothing was to stand in its way. I besieged his office, I waylaid his myrmidons, I haunted his path, I poisoned, I tried to flatter myself, his life; I wrote him at any rate letters by the dozen and showed him up to his friends and his enemies. The only thing I didn't do was to urge Miss Delavoy to write to her solicitors or to the newspapers. The final result, of course, of what I did and what I didn't was to create, on the subject of the sole copy of so rare an original, a curiosity that, by the time The Cynosure appeared with the reproduction, made the month's sale, as I was destined to learn, take a tremendous jump. The portrait of John Delavoy, prodigiously 'paragraphed' in advance and with its authorship flushing through, was accompanied by a page or two, from an anonymous hand, of the pleasantest, liveliest comment. The press was genial, the success immense, current criticism had never flowed so full, and it was universally felt that the handsome thing had been done. The process employed by Mr. Beston had left, as he had promised, nothing to be desired; and the sketch itself, the next week, arrived in safety, and with only a smutch or two, by the post. I placed my article, naturally, in another magazine, but was disappointed, I confess, as to what it discoverably did in literary circles for its subject. This ache, however, was muffled. There was a worse victim than I, and there was consolation of a sort in our having out together the question of literary circles. The great orb of The Cynosure, wasn't that a literary circle? By the time we had fairly to face this question we had achieved the union that—at least for resistance or endurance—is supposed to be strength.