# The Author of "Trixie"/Chapter 7

Dunkle, finding himself swamped in debts and bankruptcy staring him in the face, had naturally turned his thought to the production of another book. Having a name now with which (as he believed) to conjure, he carried a few dozen of his poems to Messrs. Capper and Ironsides in the confident expectation that they would jump at them. No volume of poems could, of course, hope to make money as "Trixie" had made it; but Dunkle felt that, properly engineered, such a volume with his name on it should be worth a good many thousands ​of pounds to him. He longed, too, to show his true quality to the world. Could he but hear himself acclaimed a great or even a true poet, he would think the experience cheaply bought by all the annoyances which "Trixie" had occasioned him.
So one morning he called at the offices of Messrs. Capper with his poems in his pocket and put it to Mr. Indermaur.
Dunkle was much too important an author to be hacked into the street. Mr. Indermaur succeeded in restraining himself. He said: "Poems, Mr. Dunkle? Delightful. Most interesting. Indeed, I had no idea that you wrote verse. We shall of course, be proud to be privileged to peruse them. But I ought to tell you, Mr. Dunkle, that we are not the right people for poems. We have never yet published any, and, frankly, we have not the machinery ​for disposing of such wares. You will do better, I believe, to submit this interesting and delightful volume to some house which specialises in poetry. But, of course, we shall be charmed to consider them."
Dunkle understood that his name wasn't going to conjure Messrs. Capper into producing any volume of his poems. He looked sulky and said nothing.
"What we were hoping for from you," said Mr. Indermaur, "was—need I say it?—another novel. Another 'Trixie,' if that is possible. Offer us another novel, Mr. Dunkle, with a good throbbing Heart Interest in it, and we shall not be slow to accept it. But poems? Well, as I was saying, poems we do not exactly hunger for. Not even yours, Mr. Dunkle. Not—even—yours."
Dunkle looked sulkier than ever. He put ​his poems back in his pocket and got up. A violent temptation assailed him to tell Indermaur that "Trixie" was the work of Archdeacon Roach. Just to see what Indermaur would say and do. But he was accustomed to repressing this particular temptation (which assailed him fifty times a day) and he repressed it now.
"I shall not pay you to produce my poems, Indermaur," he said, "if that's what you mean."
"Oh," said Mr. Indermaur persuasively, "don't let us talk about poems, Mr. Dunkle. Let us talk about the new great novel you're going to write for us. Shan't us?"
Dunkle left the offices of Messrs. Capper and Ironsides in a very depressed state of mind. He had surely thought that Capper's ​would not only do a book of poetry for him but also market it successfully. He knew better now.
"Yes," he said to himself as he shambled disconsolately along Henrietta Street, "I am now tarred all over and inches deep and permanently with the reputation of a successful novelist, and a novelist I am to be henceforward and for ever. There's not a publisher of the lot who will risk a dud threepence on my exquisite poems, though I have only to show myself with a new fiction to sell and they'll tear the beards off one another to handle it. If I'm ever to get these things of mine produced now, I shall have to do it under another name than my own. It's a pity," here he gave a rather dreadful little laugh, "that poetry—at least my kind of poetry—is no more permissible for Archdeacons than is fiction. ​Otherwise I might invite His Whiskers to help me."
"Well," he went on, "money has got to be raised somehow, and soon, and since my poetry is evidently going to say nothing to the Beni Barabbas, I'd better gird up my loins and bloody well write a successor to 'Trixie' for myself. I can draw ten thousand advance royalties from Cappers on the MS. at sight, and if Chlöe won't swallow it as another burlesque, she just needn't. Not that I believe she'll care now. What she wants, now, is money and lots of it. The same with me, for that matter. Yes, I'm afraid our ideals have rather faded out since we married. Thoroughly corrupt, that's what we are. ​Oh! cursed gold! And now to get some more of it."
He went back to Grosvenor Street, sat down and began to try to invent a plot for this novel that he proposed to write. Do you think he could discover anything of the kind? He couldn't. For fourteen days and nights he devoted his every solitary moment to the task of devising a story with a really strong Heart Interest. Nothing came; nothing whatever; no plot of any sort at all. He toiled valiantly; he even moiled; whatever he did, the result was the same—blank paper. The truth is that Dunkle's genius was purely lyrical. For narrative he had no turn. He could do you three neat enough little four-line stanzas on "Twilight" or to "A Green Fly caught in a Spider's Web," or about "The Sewage Farm," but when it came to plotting a story, he simply wasn't ​there. At his fortnight's end he had achieved absolutely nothing but his hero's name, and this was only Leonard Bywater. What to do with this person he had not the faintest idea. He didn't even know where he lived—I mean whether the story was to be about London or Sussex or South Africa or where. Much less did he know when this Leonard Bywater lived—I mean whether he was a man of to-day or of yesterday or of to-morrow, though he felt pretty certain that he wasn't an Ancient Roman. As for his appearance, he might have had any kind of nose or eyes or hair, and Dunkle would have been none the wiser. It is almost impossible to be more vague than was Dunkle about this hero of his. He wasn't even interested in him. He disliked him, indeed, most heartily and wished for nothing less than the improvement of their acquaintance. ​He didn't care a hang what happened to the blighter.
"Well," he decided at last, "it's no use going on any longer in this way, that's certain. I am evidently incapable of writing a novel, and, however gratifying that discovery may, from one point of view, be, from another it is immensely tiresome. Money, and lots of it, I must have, or Chloë and I are bust. Yet how am I to get any unless I have a manuscript to show or at least a few chapters of one? How? How? How?"
At this moment a note was brought to him by his second footman. It was the Archdeacon's invitation to tea. He read it and smiled for the first time in a fortnight. "By gum!" he said, smiting his knee. "Here's how. He shall do it. He shall. I'll threaten to tell on him if he won't. I'll undertake to queer his ​bishopric for him unless he writes me a new novel."
He smiled again. This was the second time he had done it in a fortnight.