They were beardless,
breathless, and hectic like the boy, but nobody could have been keener
than Rickman to recognize the immortal adolescence, the swift panting
of the pursuing god, the burning of the inextinguishable flame. He
wrote a letter to him, several letters, out of the fulness of his
heart. Then Maddox, to whom he had not spoken since the day of their
falling out, came up to him at the Junior Journalists, shook his hand
as if nothing had happened, and thanked him for his appreciation of
young Paterson. He said that it had put new life into the boy. They
made it up over young Paterson. And that was another step towards the
inevitable conclusion.
The next step was that somebody who was paying for the boy's doctor's
bills paid also for the publication of his poems. They arrived (this
of course was only to be expected) at the office of _Metropolis_ (the
slender sheaf grown slenderer by some omissions which Rickman had
advised). But it was Fate that contrived that they should arrive in
the same week with a volume (by no means slender), a volume of Poems
issued by the publishers of _Metropolis_ and written by a friend (and
an influential friend) of the editor. Therein were the last sweet
pipings of the pastoral Fulcher. No other hand but Jewdwine's, as
Jewdwine sorrowfully owned, could have done anything for this work,
and he meant to have devoted a flattering article to it in the next
number. But in the arrangements of the unforeseen it was further
provided that Jewdwine should be disabled, at what he playfully called
the "critical moment," by an attack of influenza.
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