# The Author of "Trixie"/Chapter 5

Two months later "Trixie" was published at seven shillings net. Messrs. Capper hadn't, as you notice, let any grass grow up between their toes. Believing that they had a good thing in "Trixie," they had put their hearts into their work and rushed the book out like lightning.
They gave it a sweet jacket, showing a really pretty girl's face. They heralded it with innumerable paragraphs. They advertised it largely. They did everything they knew.
In spite of this, the book was an instantaneous success. The first edition of three ​thousand was sold out in a week. The second edition of eight thousand went off like magic. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth followed. Then came the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second. After the twenty-second the twenty-third appeared, and then the twenty-fourth, -fifth, -sixth, -seventh and -eighth.
By this time America had got it and was pouring it out by the ten thousand. They sold a quarter of a million in no time at all.
Dunkle's mail increased a thousand-fold. Everybody wanted to meet him, either in order to secure his attendance at their parties or to touch him for money. All the magazines and newspapers wanted to publish his portrait. The press-agents ​were all after him. So were the Birthday Honours brokers.
Of these advances Dunkle took not the smallest notice. Money was pouring in upon him, and he was much too busy getting rid of it to think of answering letters. How much, first and last, he drew in royalties on "Trixie" who shall say? Not I. I have been told that he made fifty thousand pounds out of the book. I have been told that he made one hundred and seventy thousand out of it. I have been told that he made three hundred and six thousand out of it. I have been told that he made a cool million out of it. Actually a cool one. We are not required to believe these fairy tales. The prizes of the fiction market are substantial, but at their biggest they look very small potatoes beside those which are to be gained elsewhere. If you want to acquire money in impressive ​quantities, don't waste your time making something that people can read; make something that they can eat or smoke or chew or wear or dance to or wash with or apply externally or take three times a day after meals.
I don't believe Dunkle made more than sixty or seventy thousand pounds out of "Trixie." Still, that is quite a nice little sum of money to get out of one novel. None of mine has made more for me. Dunkle, at any rate, and Chloë were well content with the way the royalties came in. They were human and young and ardent and it would have been perfectly monstrous and unnatural had they objected to being furnished with the means of satisfying their desire to have a superlative time. They were out of their Chelsea studio and into a house in Grosvenor Street almost before the ink was dry on Dunkle's ​endorsement of his first post-publication cheque from Cappers. It amounted, I may tell you, to nineteen thousand pounds, four shillings and twopence.
At the same time Chloë set herself stoutly to realise that high ambition which dwells in every girl's heart, namely, to be the best-dressed woman in the world. A most horrible orgy of spending took place. Henceforward her days were passed wholly in Hanover Square and its purlieus. She lived surrounded by smiling modistes, smirking cutters, beaming skirt-hands, and ogling mannequins.
In her huge scarlet Bournville limousine she drove from dressmaker to milliner, from milliner to bootmaker, from bootmaker to corsetière, from corsetière to lingerie maker, from lingerie maker to glover, from glover to stocking merchant, from stocking merchant to furrier, from ​furrier to another furrier, and from him to a third. Furs? Good gracious, I should say so. Ermine, sable, musquash, mink, skunk, chipmunk, squirrel, opossum, armadillo, Kolinsky, beaver, buffalo, pony, Russian lamb, iguana, Zam-buk, catafalque, chush-chush, blastoderm—she had them all. And all the rest. She went perpetually furred to the eyes and every day in a new fur. The heat was appalling that season, but she managed to survive by wearing nothing under her hairy coats except stockings, stays and a lawn combination.
The rest of her wardrobe was to match. I shall not describe it, for it is all out of fashion now and can be of interest to no one. I will only say that of costumes, hats, boots, shoes and all other things which a woman can hang, pin, fasten or pull on to herself she had, in no time at ​all, as many as would have furnished a half-dozen of big shops.
I have mentioned her limousine. She had other cars—a landaulette, a runabout, a touring car. To look after and drive these vehicles, she maintained two shuvvers and a mechanic. They robbed her mercilessly, as did every one else who came near her—her butler, for instance, and her French maid and her chef and all the rest of her domestic staff.
She entertained. Her house in Grosvenor Street became a sort of free hotel for her friends and their friends and the friends of those friends' friends. The Dunkles were out a good deal, but it didn't seem to matter whether they were at home or not, the feasting and dancing went on in the Grosvenor Street house just the same. It began as a rule about half-past twelve, when a few of Chloë's intimates would drop ​in for cocktails and a fox-trot or two in the drawing-room before lunch, and it ended at any time after three in the morning. They danced to the gramophone from half-past twelve till two; after lunch they had an orchestra till six; then they had the gramophone again till nine, when another orchestra came in for the night. They used Dunkle's study for roulette and baccarat.
By the end of the season Dunkle was fourteen thousand pounds in debt.
Anyone would have said at this time that Chloë and her husband were exuberantly happy. They weren't. Their ointment, believe me, lacked not its fly. Riotous behaviour (says the copy-book) frequently conceals a sorrowful preoccupation. This was a case of it. Chloë and Dunkle, for ​all their apparent jollity, were at heart quite wretched.
Don't mistake me. Their debts didn't worry them. Their trouble went deeper than any debts can go. This was it—nobody would accept their account of "Trixie."
The reviewers either damned the book for a preposterous lump of false and sentimental twaddle or praised it for a notable masterpiece of pathetic and elevating sincerity. Not one of them discovered it to be a buffoonery, a ludicrosity, a burlesquerie of quite astonishing farcicality. The people who came by the score to interview Dunkle all treated him reverently. When he assured them that "Trixie" was nothing but a parody on the Sob-Stuff Novel, they supposed that he was joking and went away to write columns about the endearing modesty of this Great ​Human Story-teller. Chloë backed him up valiantly, quite without effect. The interviewers praised her gowns and her scheme of house decoration and wrote in their papers that her hair was Titian red, which it wasn't. They said how impossible it would have been for Dunkle to write his book had his wife not been by his side to cheer him and strengthen him with her wonderful and beautiful belief in his work.
You might think that the friends of Dunkle and Chloë would be less incredulous. Not a bit of it. They simply told Dunkle and Chloë that it might be a clever enough try-on at a get-out, but that it wouldn't wash with them. "Trixie" was muck, they said, and Dunkle ought to be ashamed of himself. If he had to lower himself to write a novel, he might at least have written something decent by which they ​meant indecent; something calculated to raise a howl; something that the libraries would be obliged to ban; something that would, at any rate, not bring discredit upon him and his coterie. But "Trixie," O Lord! Of all the potageries, this was surely the most soupy. A filthy slop of stuff. Obscenely wholesome. Absolutely pornographical, it was so sweet and tender. And now poor old Dunk, having in all good faith perpetrated this calamity, had come to himself, perceived what he had done, and, in a panic, had hatched up with Chloë this story about the book being a burlesque. No, no, it wouldn't do. Not with them. They knew better.
Don't imagine that they cut Dunkle's acquaintance. So long as he kept open house in Grosvenor Street his acquaintance was a thing to be cultivated. "Trixie," having made a fortune for its author, was ​to be forgiven him. But though they continued to know him and be entertained by him, they made no secret of their scorn for his book. They were always chaffing him about it.
As for the people that swarmed round Dunkle and Chloë wherever they went outside their own house, it was, of course, hopeless to expect to convince them that "Trixie" was a joke. These people had wept happy tears over the book; they doted on it; they thought it the most lovely tale that had been written since "The Rosary." All they wanted to do was to shake Dunkle by the hand and tell him what a joy his beautiful tale had been to them, what good it had done them, how it had made this dingy and wicked old world a brighter and better place for them, how Life would never be the same for them now that they had ​drunk at the fountain of his inspired optimism. And so on. It was at times all Dunkle could do to keep his hands off these bletherers. His own jeering friends were infinitely less trying to his temper.
No, decidedly Dunkle and Chloë were not happy.
If it hadn't been for all the money they were handling and the glorious spree they were having with it, they must have been downright miserable. It is a terrible thing for a brilliant young poet like Dunkle to know that he is universally credited with having written a sentimental Best Seller; it is a terrible thing for his wife (if she happens to be a girl like Chloë) to realise that her husband is famous throughout two hemispheres as the author of a dish of tripe. If they could have persuaded only a few of their intimates to perceive a comical intention in "Trixie"! But it ​wasn't to be done. A joke which no one will share with you quickly loses its flavour. Chloë found it every day harder to remain unconvinced, Dunkle to pretend, that "Trixie" was a Satirical masterpiece. The miserable young man saw the day fast approaching when the scales would fall from his wife's eyes and she would know the book for what it was, the day when nothing he might find to say would any longer avail to keep her hoodwinked. And then what?
No wonder they were dissipated.