“But surely,” said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend to himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower upon Herbert, “surely genius is a very rare thing!”
“Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up in a book it’s got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine yourself Falstaff, and if there weren’t hundreds of Falstaffs in every generation, to be ensamples of his ungodly life, he’d be as dead as a doornail tomorrow—imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so, sitting down to write Henry IV, or The Merry Wives. It’s simply preposterous. You wouldn’t be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Whereas, surely, though you mustn’t let me bore you with all this piffle, it’s Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented reporter.
“Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio—they live on their own, as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There’s a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. What the devil are you, my dear chap, but genius itself, with all the world brand new upon your shoulders? And who’d have thought it of you ten days ago?
“It’s simply and solely because we’re all, poor wretches, dumb—dumb as butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am, trickling out this—this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper does Sappho. But that’s what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts and vagabonds—and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print, I can tell you. We’re all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged with the secondhand, and barnacled with respectability until—until the touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there’s no mistaking it; oh no!”
“But what,” said Lawford uneasily, “what on earth do you mean by the touch?”
“I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery too. When you squeeze through to the other side. When you suffer a kind of conversion of the mind; become aware of your senses. When you get a living inkling. When you become articulate to yourself. When you see.”
“I am awfully stupid,” Lawford murmured, “but even now I don’t really follow you a bit. But when, as you say, you do become articulate to yourself, what happens then?”
“Why, then,” said Herbert with a shrug almost of despair, “then begins the weary tramp back. One by one drop off the truisms, and the Grundyisms, and the pedantries, and all the stillborn claptrap of the marketplace sloughs off. Then one can seriously begin to think about saving one’s soul.”
“Saving one’s soul,” groaned Lawford; “why, I am not even sure of my own body yet.” He walked slowly over to the window and with every thought in his head as quiet as doves on a sunny wall, stared out into the garden of green things growing, leaves fading and falling water. “I tell you what,” he said, turning irresolutely, “I wonder if you could possibly find time to write me out a translation of Sabathier. My French is much too hazy to let me really get at the chap. He’s gone now; but I really should like to know what kind of stuff exactly he has left behind.”
“Oh, Sabathier!” said Herbert, laughing. “What do you think of that, Grisel?” he asked, turning to his sister, who at that moment had looked in at the door. “Here’s Mr. Lawford asking me to make a translation of Sabathier. Lunch, Lawford.”
Lawford sighed. And not until he had slowly descended half the narrow uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to go to roost.
“I think, do you know,” he managed to blurt out at last “I think I ought to be getting home again. The house is empty—and—”
“You shall go this evening,” said Herbert, “if you really must insist on it. But honestly, Lawford, we both think that after what the last few days must have been, it is merely common sense to take a rest. How can you possibly rest with a dozen empty rooms echoing every thought you think? There’s nothing more to worry about; you agree to that. Send your people a note saying that you are here, safe and sound. Give them a chance of lighting a fire, and driving in the fatted calf. Stay on with us just the week out.”
Lawford turned from one to the other of the two friendly faces. But what was dimly in his mind refused to express itself. “I think, you know, I—” he began falteringly.
“But it’s just this thinking that’s the deuce—this preposterous habit of having continually to make up one’s mind. Off with his head, Grisel!
