There was once an Author who pursued fame and prosperity in a
pleasant villa on the south coast of England. He wrote stories of an
acceptable nature and rejoiced in a growing public esteem, carefully
offending no one and seeking only to please. He had married under
circumstances of qualified and tolerable romance a lady who wrote
occasional but otherwise regular verse, he was the father of a little
daughter, whose reported sayings added much to his popularity, and
some of the very best people in the land asked him to dinner. He was a
deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime Minister, a literary
knighthood was no remote possibility for him, and even the Nobel
prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not altogether beyond his
hopes. And this amount of prosperity had not betrayed him into any
un-English pride. He remembered that manliness and simplicity which
are expected from authors. He smoked pipes and not the excellent
cigars he could have afforded. He kept his hair cut and never posed.
He did not hold himself aloof from people of the inferior and less
successful classes. He habitually travelled third class in order to
study the characters he put into his delightful novels; he went for
long walks and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew out his
gardener. And though he worked steadily, he did not give up the care
of his body, which threatened a certain plumpness and what is more to
the point, a localized plumpness, not generally spread over the system
but exaggerating the anterior equator. This expansion was his only
care. He thought about fitness and played tennis, and every day, wet
or fine, he went for at least an hour's walk....
Yet this man, so representative of Edwardian literature--for it is in
the reign of good King Edward the story begins--in spite of his
enviable achievements and prospects, was doomed to the most exhausting
and dubious adventures before his life came to its unhonoured end....
Because I have not told you everything about him. Sometimes--in the
morning sometimes--he would be irritable and have quarrels with his
shaving things, and there were extraordinary moods when it would seem
to him that living quite beautifully in a pleasant villa and being
well-off and famous, and writing books that were always good-humoured
and grammatical and a little distinguished in an inoffensive way, was
about as boring and intolerable a life as any creature with a soul to
be damned could possibly pursue. Which shows only that God in putting
him together had not forgotten that viscus the liver which is usual on
such occasions....
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The winter at the seaside is less agreeable and more bracing than the
summer, and there were days when this Author had almost to force
himself through the wholesome, necessary routines of his life, when
the south-west wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and
slapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that
Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and round his
wrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door. And the
grey waves he saw from his window came rolling inshore under the
hurrying grey rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along the
undercliff into vast, feathering fountains of foam and sud and send a
salt-tasting spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he would put on
his puttees and his water-proof cape and his biggest brierwood pipe,
and out he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, knowing that so
he would be all the brighter for his nice story-writing after tea.
On such a day he went out. He went out very resolutely along the
seaside gardens of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved to oblige
himself to go right past the harbour and up to the top of the east
cliff before ever he turned his face back to the comforts of fire and
wife and tea and buttered toast....
And somewhere, perhaps half a mile away from home, he became aware of
a queer character trying to keep abreast of him.
His impression was of a very miserable black man in the greasy,
blue-black garments of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steamship in
the harbour, and going with a sort of lame hobble.
As he passed this individual the Author had a transitory thought of
how much Authors don't know in the world, how much, for instance, this
shivering, cringing body might be hiding within itself, of inestimable
value as "local colour" if only one could get hold of it for "putting
into" one's large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one sometimes tap
these sources? Kipling, for example, used to do so, with most
successful results.... And then the Author became aware that this
enigma was hurrying to overtake him. He slackened his pace....
The creature wasn't asking for a light; it was begging for a box of
matches. And, what was odd, in quite good English.
The Author surveyed the beggar and slapped his pockets. Never had he
seen so miserable a face. It was by no means a prepossessing face,
with its aquiline nose, its sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot
eyes much too close together, its V-shaped, dishonest mouth and
drenched chin-tuft. And yet it was attractively animal and pitiful.
The idea flashed suddenly into the Author's head: "Why not, instead of
going on, thinking emptily, through this beastly weather--why not take
this man back home now, to the warm, dry study, and give him a hot
drink and something to smoke, and _draw him out_?"
Get something technical and first-hand that would rather score off
Kipling.
"Its damnably cold!" he shouted, in a sort of hearty, forecastle
voice.
"It's worse than that," said the strange stoker.
"It's a hell of a day!" said the Author, more forcible than ever.
"Don't remind me of hell," said the stoker, in a voice of inappeasable
regret.
The Author slapped his pockets again. "You've got an infernal cold.
Look here, my man--confound it! would you like a hot grog?..."
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