Part 10

“It is heavier than you think,” replied the Woman of the World. “George persists I ought to put up with him because he is a true poet. I cannot admit the argument. The poet I honestly admire. I like to have him about the place. He lies on my drawing-room table in white vellum, and helps to give tone to the room. For the poet I am quite prepared to pay the four-and-six demanded; the man I don’t want. To be candid, he is not worth his own discount.”

“It is hardly fair,” urged the Minor Poet, “to confine the discussion to poets. A friend of mine some years ago married one of the most charming women in New York, and that is saying a good deal. Everybody congratulated him, and at the outset he was pleased enough with himself. I met him two years later in Geneva, and we travelled together as far as Rome. He and his wife scarcely spoke to one another the whole journey, and before I left him he was good enough to give me advice which to another man might be useful. ‘Never marry a charming woman,’ he counselled me. ‘Anything more unutterably dull than “the charming woman” outside business hours you cannot conceive.’”

“I think we must agree to regard the preacher,” concluded the Philosopher, “merely as a brother artist. The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer, but his voice stirs our souls. The preacher holds aloft his banner of purity. He waves it over his own head as much as over the heads of those around him. He does not cry with the Master, ‘Come to Me,’ but ‘Come with me, and be saved.’ The prayer ‘Forgive them’ was the prayer not of the Priest, but of the God. The prayer dictated to the Disciples was ‘Forgive us,’ ‘Deliver us.’ Not that he should be braver, not that he should be stronger than they that press behind him, is needed of the leader, but that he should know the way. He, too, may faint, he, too, may fall; only he alone must never turn his back.”

“It is quite comprehensible, looked at from one point of view,” remarked the Minor Poet, “that he who gives most to others should himself be weak. The professional athlete pays, I believe, the price of central weakness. It is a theory of mine that the charming, delightful people one meets with in society are people who have dishonestly kept to themselves gifts entrusted to them by Nature for the benefit of the whole community. Your conscientious, hard-working humorist is in private life a dull dog. The dishonest trustee of laughter, on the other hand, robbing the world of wit bestowed upon him for public purposes, becomes a brilliant conversationalist.”

“But,” added the Minor Poet, turning to me, “you were speaking of a man named Longrush, a great talker.”

“A long talker,” I corrected. “My cousin mentioned him third in her list of invitations. ‘Longrush,’ she said with conviction, ‘we must have Longrush.’ ‘Isn’t he rather tiresome?’ I suggested. ‘He is tiresome,’ she agreed, ‘but then he’s so useful. He never lets the conversation drop.’”

“Why is it?” asked the Minor Poet. “Why, when we meet together, must we chatter like a mob of sparrows? Why must every assembly to be successful sound like the parrot-house of a zoological garden?”

“I remember a parrot story,” I said, “but I forget who told it to me.”

“Maybe one of us will remember as you go on,” suggested the Philosopher.

“A man,” I said—“an old farmer, if I remember rightly—had read a lot of parrot stories, or had heard them at the club. As a result he thought he would like himself to be the owner of a parrot, so journeyed to a dealer and, according to his own account, paid rather a long price for a choice specimen. A week later he re-entered the shop, the parrot borne behind him by a boy. ‘This bird,’ said the farmer, ‘this bird you sold me last week ain’t worth a sovereign!’ ‘What’s the matter with it?’ demanded the dealer. ‘How do I know what’s the matter with the bird?’ answered the farmer. ‘What I tell you is that it ain’t worth a sovereign—’tain’t worth a half a sovereign!’ ‘Why not?’ persisted the dealer; ‘it talks all right, don’t it?’ ‘Talks!’ retorted the indignant farmer, ‘the damn thing talks all day, but it never says anything funny!’”

“A friend of mine,” said the Philosopher, “once had a parrot—”

“Won’t you come into the garden?” said the Woman of the World, rising and leading the way.

“MYSELF,” said the Minor Poet, “I read the book with the most intense enjoyment. I found it inspiring—so inspiring, I fear I did not give it sufficient attention. I must read it again.”

“I understand you,” said the Philosopher. “A book that really interests us makes us forget that we are reading. Just as the most delightful conversation is when nobody in particular appears to be talking.”

“Do you remember meeting that Russian man George brought down here about three months ago?” asked the Woman of the World, turning to the Minor Poet. “I forget his name. As a matter of fact, I never knew it. It was quite unpronounceable and, except that it ended, of course, with a double f, equally impossible to spell. I told him frankly at the beginning I should call him by his Christian name, which fortunately was Nicholas. He was very nice about it.”

“I remember him distinctly,” said the Minor Poet. “A charming man.”

“He was equally charmed with you,” replied the Woman of the World.

“I can credit it easily,” murmured the Minor Poet. “One of the most intelligent men I ever met.”

“You talked together for two hours in a corner,” said the Woman of the World. “I asked him when you had gone what he thought of you. ‘Ah! what a talker!’ he exclaimed, making a gesture of admiration with his hands. ‘I thought maybe you would notice it,’ I answered him. ‘Tell me, what did he talk about?’ I was curious to know; you had been so absorbed in yourselves and so oblivious to the rest of us. ‘Upon my word,’ he replied, ‘I really cannot tell you. Do you know, I am afraid, now I come to think of it, that I must have monopolised the conversation.’ I was glad to be able to ease his mind on that point. ‘I really don’t think you did,’ I assured him. I should have felt equally confident had I not been present.”

“You were quite correct,” returned the Minor Poet. “I have a distinct recollection of having made one or two observations myself. Indeed, if I may say so, I talked rather well.”

“You may also recollect,” continued the Woman of the World, “that the next time we met I asked you what he had said, and that your mind was equally a blank on the subject. You admitted you had found him interesting. I was puzzled at the time, but now I begin to understand. Both of you, no doubt, found the conversation so brilliant, each of you felt it must have been your own.”

“A good book,” I added—“a good talk is like a good dinner: one assimilates it. The best dinner is the dinner you do not know you have eaten.”

“A thing will often suggest interesting thought,” observed the Old Maid, “without being interesting. Often I find the tears coming into my eyes as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at, will stir a memory, start a train of thought.”

“I once,” I said, “sat next to a country-man in the pit of a music-hall some years ago. He enjoyed himself thoroughly up to half-past ten. Songs about mothers-in-law, drunken wives, and wooden legs he roared at heartily. At ten-thirty entered a well-known artiste who was then giving a series of what he called ‘Condensed Tragedies in Verse.’ At the first two my country friend chuckled hugely. The third ran: ‘Little boy; pair of skates: broken ice; heaven’s gates.’ My friend turned white, rose hurriedly, and pushed his way impatiently out of the house. I left myself some ten minutes later, and by chance ran against him again in the bar of the ‘Criterion,’ where he was drinking whisky rather copiously. ‘I couldn’t stand that fool,’ he explained to me in a husky voice. ‘Truth is, my youngest kid got drowned last winter skating. Don’t see any sense making fun of real trouble.’”

“I can cap your story with another,” said the Philosopher. “Jim sent me a couple of seats for one of his first nights a month or two ago. They did not reach me till four o’clock in the afternoon. I went down to the club to see if I could pick up anybody. The only man there I knew at all was a rather quiet young fellow, a new member. He had just taken Bates’s chambers in Staple Inn—you have met him, I think. He didn’t know many people then and was grateful for my invitation. The play was one of those Palais Royal farces—it cannot matter which, they are all exactly alike. The fun consists of somebody’s trying to sin without being found out. It always goes well. The British public invariably welcomes the theme, provided it be dealt with in a merry fashion. It is only the serious discussion of evil that shocks us. There was the usual banging of doors and the usual screaming. Everybody was laughing around us. My young friend sat with rather a curious fixed smile upon his face. ‘Fairly well constructed,’ I said to him, as the second curtain fell amid yells of delight. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I suppose it’s very funny.’ I looked at him; he was little more than a boy. ‘You are rather young,’ I said, ‘to be a moralist.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh! I shall grow out of it in time,’ he said. He told me his story later, when I came to know him better. He had played the farce himself over in Melbourne—he was an Australian. Only the third act had ended differently. His girl wife, of whom he was passionately fond, had taken it quite seriously and had committed suicide. A foolish thing to do.”

“Man is a beast!” said the Girton Girl, who was prone to strong expression.

“I thought so myself when I was younger,” said the Woman of the World.

“And don’t you now, when you hear a thing like that?” suggested the Girton Girl.