Short Fiction · The Panjandrum (3/3) (4/4)

On that evening Pat Regan and I consoled ourselves together as best we might, Jack Hallam and Walter Watt having parted from us under the walls of Marylebone Workhouse. Pat and I walked down to a modest house of refreshment with which we were acquainted in Leicester Square, and there arranged the obsequies of the Panjandrum over a pint of stout and a baked potato. Pat’s equanimity was marvellous. It had not even yet been ruffled, although the indignities thrown upon him had almost surpassed those inflicted on myself. His “Lord Bateman” had been first rejected; and, after that, his subsequent contributions had been absolutely ignored, merely because Mr. Churchill Smith had not approved his cousin’s essay upon Bishop Berkeley! “It was rot; real rot,” said Pat, alluding to Lydia’s essay, and apologising for Smith. “But why not have gone on and heard yours?” said I. “Mine would have been rot, too,” said Pat. “It isn’t so easy, after all, to do this kind of thing.”

We agreed that the obsequies should be very private. Indeed, as the Panjandrum had as yet not had a body of its own, it was hardly necessary to open the earth for the purposes of interment. We agreed simply to say nothing about it to anyone. I would go to Mr. X. and tell him that we had abandoned our project, and there would be an end of it. As the night advanced, I offered to read “The New Inmate” to my friend; but he truly remarked that of reading aloud they had surely had enough that night. When he reflected that but for the violence of Mr. Smith’s proceedings we might even then, at that moment, have been listening to an essay upon the “Basis of Political Rights,” I think that he rejoiced that the Panjandrum was no more.

On the following morning I called on Mr. X., and explained to him that portion of the occurrences of the previous evening with which it was necessary that he should be made acquainted. I thought that he was rather brusque; but I cannot complain that he was, upon the whole, unfriendly. “The truth is, Sir,” he said, “you none of you exactly knew what you wanted to be after. You were very anxious to do something grand, but hadn’t got this grand thing clear before your eye. People, you know, may have too much genius, or may have too little.” Which of the two he thought was our case he did not say; but he did promise to hear my story of “The New Inmate” read, with reference to its possible insertion in another periodical publication with which he had lately become connected. Perhaps some of my readers may remember its appearance in the first number of the Marble Arch, where it attracted no little attention, and was supposed to have given assistance, not altogether despicable, towards the establishment of that excellent periodical.

Such was the history of the Panjandrum.