But before I go on it is necessary to explain that the George Boon I
speak of is not exactly the same person as the George Boon, the Great
Writer, whose fame has reached to every bookshop in the world. The
same bodily presence perhaps they had, but that is all. Except when he
chose to allude to them, those great works on which that great fame
rests, those books and plays of his that have made him a household
word in half a dozen continents, those books with their style as
perfect and obvious as the gloss upon a new silk hat, with their flat
narrative trajectory that nothing could turn aside, their unsubdued
and apparently unsubduable healthy note, their unavoidable humour, and
their robust pathos, never came between us. We talked perpetually of
literature and creative projects, but never of that "output" of his.
We talked as men must talk who talk at all, with an untrammelled
freedom; now we were sublime and now curious, now we pursued
subtleties and now we were utterly trivial, but always it was in an
undisciplined, irregular style quite unsuitable for publication. That,
indeed, was the whole effect of the George Boon I am now trying to
convey, that he was indeed essentially not for publication. And this
effect was in no degree diminished by the fact that the photograph of
his beautiful castellated house, and of that extraordinarily
irrelevant person Mrs. Boon--for I must speak my mind of her--and of
her two dogs (Binkie and Chum), whom he detested, were, so to speak,
the poulet and salade in the menu of every illustrated magazine.
The fact of it is he was one of those people who will _not_
photograph; so much of him was movement, gesture, expression,
atmosphere, and colour, and so little of him was form. His was the
exact converse of that semi-mineral physical quality that men call
handsome, and now that his career has come to its sad truncation I see
no reason why I should further conceal the secret of the clear,
emphatic, solid impression he made upon all who had not met him. It
was, indeed, a very simple secret;--
_He never wrote anything for his public with his own hand._
He did this of set intention. He distrusted a certain freakishness of
his finger-tips that he thought might have injured him with his
multitudinous master. He knew his holograph manuscript would certainly
get him into trouble. He employed a lady, the lady who figures in his
will, Miss Bathwick, as his amanuensis. In Miss Bathwick was all his
security. She was a large, cool, fresh-coloured, permanently young
lady, full of serious enthusiasms; she had been faultlessly educated
in a girls' high school of a not too modern type, and she regarded
Boon with an invincible respect. She wrote down his sentences
(spelling without blemish in all the European languages) as they came
from his lips, with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-looking
typewriter. If he used a rare word or a whimsical construction, she
would say, "I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon," and he would at once correct
it; and if by any lapse of an always rather too nimble imagination he
carried his thoughts into regions outside the tastes and interests of
that enormous _ante-bellum_ public it was his fortune to please, then,
according to the nature of his divagation, she would either cough or
sigh or--in certain eventualities--get up and leave the room.
By this ingenious device--if one may be permitted to use the
expression for so pleasant and trustworthy an assistant--he did to a
large extent free himself from the haunting dread of losing his public
by some eccentricity of behaviour, some quirk of thought or
fluctuation of "attitude" that has pursued him ever since the great
success of "Captain Clayball," a book he wrote to poke fun at the
crude imaginings of a particularly stupid schoolboy he liked, had put
him into the forefront of our literary world.