THE WITS
There now remained the gathering of wits fixed for the evening. His
publisher had asked him to dinner, but he had declined, from a secret
and absurd desire to dine at "The Cock." This he gratified, and with his
mind full of the spacious times of the early Victorians, he turned into
the publisher's little room about nine o'clock to meet some of
the later.
There was no great muster as yet. Some half-a-dozen rather shy young men
spasmodically picked up strange drawings or odd-looking books, lying
about on the publisher's tables, struggled maidenly with cigars, sipped
a little whisky and soda; but little was said.
Among them a pale-faced lad of about fifteen, miraculously
self-possessed, stood with his back to the chimney-piece. But soon
others began to turn in, and by ten the room was as full of chatter and
smoke as it could hold. Not least conspicuous among the talkers was the
pale-faced boy of fifteen. Henry had been sitting near to him, and had
been suddenly startled by his unexpectedly breaking out into a volley of
learning, delivered in a voice impressively deliberate and sententious.
"What a remarkable boy that is!" said Henry, innocently, to the
publisher.
"Yes; but he's not quite a boy,--though he's young enough. A curious
little creature, morbidly learned. A friend of mine says that he would
like to catch him and keep him in a bottle, and label it 'the learned
homunculus.'"
"What dialect is it he is talking in?" said Henry; "I don't remember to
have heard it before."
The publisher smiled: "My dear fellow, you must be careful what you say.
That is what we call 'the Oxford voice.'"
"How remarkable!" said Henry, his attention called off by a being with a
face that half suggested a faun, and half suggested a flower,--a small,
olive-skinned face crowned with purply black hair, that kept falling in
an elflock over his forehead, and violet eyes set slant-wise. He was
talking earnestly of fairies, in a beautiful Irish accent, and Henry
liked him. The attraction seemed mutual, and Henry found himself drawn
into a remarkable relation about a fairy-hill in Connemara, and fairy
lights that for several nights had been seen glimmering about it; and
how at last he--that is, the narrator--and a particularly hard-headed
friend of his had kept watch one moonlit night, with the result that
they had actually seen and talked with the queen of the fairies and
learned many secrets of the ----. The narrator here made use of a long,
unpronounceable Irish word, which Henry could not catch.
"I should have explained some of these phenomena to you," whispered the
publisher presently, noticing that Henry looked a little bewildered.
"This is a young Irish poet, who, in the intervals of his raising the
devil, writes very beautiful lyrics that he may well have learned from
the fairies. It is his method to seem mad on magic and such things. You
will meet with many strange methods here to-night. Don't be alarmed if
some one comes and talks to you about strange sins. You have come to
London in the 'strange sins' period. I will explain afterwards."
He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural
length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of
the Borgias.
"I suppose you never committed a murder yourself?" he asked Henry,
languidly.
"No," said Henry, catching the spirit of the foolishness; "no, not yet.
I am keeping that--" implying that he was reserving so extreme a
stimulant till all his other vices failed him.
Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face,
curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip
of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.
At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis:
a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball
in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, and enormous spectacles.
"That," said the publisher, referring to the moon-in-the-pine-wood young
man, "is our young apostle of sentiment, our new man of feeling, the
best-hated man we have; and the other is our young apostle of blood. He
is all for muscle and brutality--and he makes all the money. It is one
of our many fashions just now to sing 'Britain and Brutality.' But my
impression is that our young man of feeling will have his day,--though
he will have to wait for it. He would hasten it if he would cut his
hair; but that, he says, he will never do. His hair, he says, is his
battle-cry. Well, he enjoys himself--and loves a fight, though you
mightn't think it to look at him."
A supercilious young man, with pink cheeks, and a voice which his
admirers compared to Shelley's, then came up to Henry and asked him what
he thought of Mallarmé's latest sonnet; but finding Henry confessedly at
sea, turned the conversation to the Empire ballet, of which,
unfortunately, Henry knew as little. The conversation then languished,
and the Shelley-voiced young man turned elsewhere for sympathy, with a
shrug at your country bumpkins who know nothing later than Rossetti.
In the thick of the conversational turmoil, Henry's attention had from
time to time been attracted by the noise proceeding from a blustering,
red-headed man, with a face of fire.
"Who is that?" at last he found opportunity to ask his friend.
"That is our greatest critic," said the publisher.
"Oh!" said Henry, "I must try and hear what he is saying. It seems
important from the way he is listened to."
So Henry listened, and heard how the fire-faced man said the word "damn"
with great volubility and variety of cadence, and other words to the
same effect, and how the little group around him hung upon his words and
said to each other, "How brilliant!" "How absolute!"
Henry turned to his friend. "The only word I can catch is the word
'damn,'" he said.
"That," said the publisher, with a laugh, "is the master-word of
fashionable criticism."
Presently a little talkative man came up, and said that he hoped Mr.
Mesurier was an adherent of the rightful king.
"Oh, of course!" said Henry.
"And do you belong to any secret society?" asked the little man.
Henry couldn't say that he did.
"Well, you must join us!" he said.
"I suppose there won't be a rising just yet?" asked Henry, realising
that this was the Jacobite method.
"Not just yet," said the little man, reassuringly. So Henry was
enrolled.
* * * * *
And so it went on till past midnight, when Henry at last escaped, to
talk it all over with the stars. The evening had naturally puzzled him,
as a man will always be puzzled who has developed under the influence of
the main tendencies of his generation, and who finds himself suddenly in
a backwater of fanciful reaction. Henry, in his simple way, was a
thinker and a radical, and he had nourished himself on the great
main-road masters of English literature. He had followed the lead of
modern philosophers and scientists, and had arrived at a mystical
agnosticism,--the first step of which was to banish the dogmas of the
church as old wives' tales. He considered that he had inherited the
hard-won gains of the rationalists. But he came to London and found
young men feebly playing with the fire of that Romanism which he
regarded as at once the most childish and the most dangerous of all
intellectual obsessions. In an age of great biologists and electricians,
he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the
philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he
came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the
metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool
had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of
Stuart, a Jacobite of charades. But only once had he heard the name of
Milton; it was the learned boy of fifteen who had quoted him,--a
lifelong debt of gratitude; and never once had he heard the voice of
simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply,
passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart
upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had
been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be
doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with
lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of
English literature was not flowing here.
As he neared his hotel, he thought of his morning visit to Goldsmith's
tomb, and ten-fold he repented the little half-sneer with which he had
bought the flowers. In a boyish impulse, he rang the Temple bell, and
found his way again to the lonely corner. His flowers were lying there
in the moonlight, and again he read: "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith."
"Forgive me, Goldy," he murmured. "Well may men bring you flowers,--for
you wrote, not as those yonder; you wrote for the human heart."