Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the
substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not
exist...which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it
was like beating her head against a stone.
Her father warned her again: `Why don't you get yourself a beau,
Connie? Do you all the good in the world.'
That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who
had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken
up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he
wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had
been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and
revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and
bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made
this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and
his corpse thrown into the refuse can.
Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down
Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best
tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.
Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment
in thyoung man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the
ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he
would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when
the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no
doubt do Clifford `good' over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of
kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way,
especially `over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable
what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most
nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction,
when he found he had been made ridiculous.
Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to
become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did not himself
know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a
first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty,
bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert
themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made,
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