“Nothing of the kind. You must have misunderstood me. Starkness is quite out of place in poetry. A poem should be a thing of beauty and charm and sentiment, and have as its theme the sweetest and divinest of all human emotions—Love. Only Love can inspire the genuine bard. Love, Garroway, is a fire that glows and enlarges, until it warms and beams upon multitudes, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all Nature with its generous flames. Shakespeare speaks of the ecstasy of love, and Shakespeare knew what he was talking about. Ah, better to live in the lowliest cot, Garroway, than pine in a palace alone. In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed: in war he mounts the warrior’s steed. In halls, in gay attire is seen; in hamlets, dances on the green. Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below and saints above; for love is heaven and heaven is love. Get these simple facts into your silly fat head, Garroway, and you may turn out a poem worth reading. If, however, you are going to take this absurd attitude about festering streets and scabrous dogs and the rest of it, you are simply wasting your time and would be better employed writing subtitles for the motion-pictures.”
Officer Garroway was not a man of forceful character. He bowed his head meekly before the storm.
“I see what you mean, Mr. Beamish.”
“I should hope you did. I have put it plainly enough. I dislike intensely this modern tendency on the part of young writers to concentrate on corpses and sewers and despair. They should be writing about Love. I tell thee Love is nature’s second sun, Garroway, causing a spring of virtues where he shines. All love is sweet, given or returned. Common as light is love, and its familiar voice wearies not ever. True love’s the gift which God has given to man alone beneath the heaven. It is not—mark this, Garroway—it is not fantasy’s hot fire, whose wishes soon as granted die. It liveth not in fierce desire, with fierce desire it does not die. It is the secret sympathy, the silver link, the silken tie, which heart to heart and mind to mind in body and in soul can bind.”
“Yes, sir. Exactly, Mr. Beamish. I quite see that.”
“Then go away and rewrite your poem on the lines I have indicated.”
“Yes, Mr. Beamish.” The policeman paused. “Before I go, there is just one other thing. …”
“There is no other thing in the world that matters except love.”
“Well, sir, there are the motion-pictures, to which you made a brief allusion just now, and. …”
“Garroway,” said Hamilton Beamish, “I trust that you are not going to tell me that, after all I have done to try to make you a poet, you wish to sink to writing motion-picture scenarios?”
“No, sir. No, indeed. But some little time ago I happened to purchase a block of stock in a picture company, and so far all my efforts to dispose of it have proved fruitless. I have begun to entertain misgivings as to the value of these shares, and I thought that, while I was here, I would ask you if you knew anything about them.”
“What is the company?”
“The Finer and Better Motion Picture Company of Hollywood, California, Mr. Beamish.”
“How many shares did you buy?”
“Fifty thousand dollars worth.”
“How much did you pay?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“You were stung,” said Hamilton Beamish. “The stock is so much waste paper. Who sold it to you?”
“I have unfortunately forgotten his name. He was a man with a red face and grey hair. And if I’d got him here now,” said Officer Garroway with honest warmth, “I’d soak him so hard it would jolt his grandchildren. The smooth, salve-slinging crocodile!”
“It is a curious thing,” said Hamilton Beamish musingly, “there seems to be floating at the back of my consciousness a sort of nebulous memory having to do with this very stock you mention. I seem to recall somebody at some time and place consulting me about it. No, it’s no good, it won’t come back. I have been much preoccupied of late, and things slip my mind. Well, run along, Garroway, and set about rewriting that poem of yours.”
The policeman’s brow was dark. There was a rebellious look in his usually mild eyes.
“Rewrite it nothing! It’s the goods.”
“Garroway!”
“I said New York was full of lepers, and so it is. Nasty, oily, lop-eared lepers that creep up to a fellow and sell him scabrous stock that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. That poem is right, and I don’t alter a word of it. No, sir!”
Hamilton Beamish shook his head.
“One of these days, Garroway, love will awaken in your heart and you will change your views.”
“One of these days,” replied the policeman frigidly, “I shall meet that red-faced guy again, and I’ll change his face. It won’t be only my heart that’ll be aching by the time I’ve finished with him.”
VIII
George Finch’s wedding-day dawned fair and bright. The sun beamed down as if George by getting married were doing it a personal favour. The breezes, playing about him, brought with them a faint but well-defined scent of orange-blossom. And from the moment when they had finished the practical business of getting outside their early worm, all the birds for miles around had done nothing but stand in the trees singing Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It was the sort of day to make a man throw out his chest and say “Tra-la!”: and George did so.
Delightful, he reflected, as he walked up from the inn after lunch, to think that in a few short hours he and Molly would be bowling away together in a magic train, each revolution of its wheels taking them nearer to the Islands of the Blest and—what was almost more agreeable—farther away from Mrs. Waddington.
It would be idle to deny that in the past three weeks George Finch
