XIII

Hubert felt called upon to entertain his friends, and one evening they all sat dining at Hurlingham in the long room. The conversation, as usual, had been about books and pictures.

It was the moment when strings of lanterns were hoisted from tree to tree. In front of a large space of sky the coloured globes were crude and trivial; but in the shadows of the trees by the river, where the mist rose into the branches, they had begun to awaken the first impression of melancholy and the sadness of fête. It was the moment when the great trees hung heavy and motionless, strangely green and solemn beneath a slate-coloured sky; and the plaintive waltz cried on Hungarian fiddle-strings, till it seemed the soul of this feminine evening. The fashionable crowd had moved out upon the lawn; the white dresses were phantom blue, and the men's coats faded into obscure masses, darkening the gathering shadows. It was the moment when voices soften, and every heart, overpowered with yearning, is impelled to tell of grief and disillusion; and every moment the wail of the fiddles grew more unbearable, tearing the heart to its very depths.

Author and actor-manager walked up the lawn puffing at their cigars. The others sat watching, knowing that the opportunity had come for criticism of their friend.

'He does not change much,' said Harding. 'Circumstances haven't affected him. A year ago he lived in a garret re-writing his play Divorce. He now rewrites Divorce in a handsome house in Sussex.'

'I thought he had finished his play,' said Thompson. 'I heard that he was going to take a theatre and produce it himself.'

'But did you not hear him say at dinner that he was re-writing as he rehearsed? I met one of the actors yesterday. He doesn't know what to make of it. He gets a new part every week to learn.'

'Do you think he'll ever produce it?'

'I doubt it. At the last moment he'll find that the third act doesn't satisfy him, and will postpone the production till the spring.'

'What do you think of his work?'

'Very intelligent, but a little insipid—like himself. Look at him. Il est bien l'homme de ses ouvres. There is something dry about him, and his writings are like himself—hard, dry and wanting in personal passion.'

'Yet he talks charmingly, with vivacity and intelligence, and he is so full of appreciation of Shakespeare, Goethe, and such genuine love for antiquity.'

'I've heard him talk Shakespeare, Goethe, and Ibsen,' said Harding, 'but I never heard him say anything new, anything personal. It seems to me that you mistake quotation for perception. He assimilates, but he originates nothing. He has read a great deal; he is covered with literature like a rock with moss and lichen. He's appreciative, I will say that for him. He would make a capital editor, or a tutor, or a don, an Oxford don. He would be perfectly happy as a don; he could read up the German critics and expound Sophocles. He would be perfectly happy as a don. As it is, he is perfectly miserable.'

'There was a fellow who had a studio over mine,' said Thompson. 'He had been in the army and used to paint a bit. The academy by chance hung a portrait, so he left the army and turned portrait-painter. One day he saw a picture by Velasquez, and he understood how horrid were the red things he used to send to the academy. He used to come down to see me; he used to say, "I wish I had never seen a picture, by Gad, it is driving me out of my mind." Poor chap, I wanted him to go back to the army. I said, Why paint? no one forces you to; it makes you miserable; don't do so any more. When you have anything to say, art is a joy; when you haven't, it is a curse to yourself and to others.'

Philipps, the editor of The Cosmopolitan, turned towards Harding, and he said—

'I cannot follow you in your estimate of Hubert Price. I don't see him either mentally or physically as you do. It seems to me that you distort the facts to make them fit in with your theory. He is tall and thin, but I do not think that his nature is hard and dry. I should, on the contrary, say that he was of a soft rather than a hard nature. The expression of his face is mild and melancholy. I do not detect the dry, hard, rocky basis of which you speak. I should say that Price was a sentimental man.'

'I have never heard of him being in love,' said Harding. 'I should say that he had been entirely uninfluenced by women.'

'But love of women is only one form of sentimentality and not the highest, nor the deepest,' said Philipps. 'I can imagine a man being exceedingly sentimental and not caring about women at all.'

'What you say is true,' said Harding. His face showed that he felt the observation to be true and was interested in it. 'But I think I described him truly when I said he was like a rock overgrown with moss and lichen. There is not sufficient root-hold for any idea to grow in him, it withers and dies. Examine his literature, and you'll see it is as I say. He has written some remarkable plays, I don't say he hasn't. But they seem to be better than they are. He gets a picturesque situation, but there is always something mechanical about it. There's a human emotion somewhere, but it's never really there; it might have been, but it is not.... It is very well done, it is very intelligent; but it does not seem to live, to palpitate.... In like manner there are men who have read everything, who understand everything, who can theorise; they can tell you all about the masterpiece, but when it comes to producing one, well, they're not on in that scene.'

'What an excellent character he would make in a novel! A drama of sterility,' said Phillips.

'Or the dramas which they bring about,' said Harding.

'Yes, or the dramas they bring about. But what drama can Price bring about—he shuts himself up in a room and tries to write a play,' said Phillips. 'I don't see how he can dramatise any life but his own.'

'All deviations from the normal tend to bring about drama,' said Harding.

'Then, why don't you do a Hubert Price in a book? It would be most interesting. Do you think you ever will?'

'I don't think so.'

'Why not? Because he is a friend of yours, and you would not like——'

'I never allow my private life to interfere with my literature. No; for quite other reasons. I admit that he represents physically and mentally a great deal of the intellectual impotence current in our time. But it would be difficult, I think, to bring vividly before the reader that tall, thin, blonde man, with his pale gentle eyes and his insipid mind. I should take quite a different kind of man as my model.'

'What kind of man?' said Phillips, and the five or six writers and painters leaned forward to listen to Harding.

'I think I should imagine a man about the medium height. A nice figure, light, trim, neat. Good-looking, straight nose, eyes bright and intelligent. I think he would have beard, a very close-cut beard. The turn of his mind would be metaphysical and poetic—an intense subtility of mind combined with much order. He would be full of little habits. He would have note-books of a special kind in which to enter his ideas. The tendency of his mind would be towards concision, and he would by degrees extend his desire for concision into the twilight and the night of symbolism.'

'A sort of constipated Browning,' said Phillips.

'Exactly,' said Harding.

'And would you have him married?' asked John Norton.

'Certainly. I imagine him living in a tiny little house somewhere near the river—Westminster or Chelsea. His wife would be a dreadful person, thin, withered, herring-gutted—a sort of red herring with a cap. But his daughter would be charming, she would have inherited her father's features. I can imagine these women living in admiration of this man, tending on him, speaking very little, removed from worldly influences, seeing only the young men who come every Tuesday evening to listen to the poet's conversation—I don't hear them saying much—I can see them sitting in a corner listening for the ten thousandth time to aestheticisms not one word of which they understand, and about ten o'clock stealing away to some mysterious chamber. Something of the poet's sterility would have descended upon them.'

'That is how you imagine un génie raté,' said Phillips. 'Your conception is clear enough; why don't you write the book?'

'Because there is nothing more to say on the subject. It is a subject for a sketch, not for a book. But of this I'm sure, that the dry-rock man would come out more clearly in a book than the soft, insipid, gentle, companionable, red-bearded fellow.'

'If Price were the dry, sterile nature you describe, we should feel no interest in him, we should not be discussing him as we are,' said Phillips.

'Yes, we should—Price suffers; we're interested in him because he suffers—because he suffers in public—"I never was happy except on those rare occasions when I thought I was a great man." In that sentence you'll find the clew to his attractiveness. But in him there is nothing of the irresponsible passion which is genius. There's that little Rose Massey—that little baby who spends half her day dreaming, and who is as ignorant as a cod-fish. Well, she has got that something—that undefinable but always recognisable something. It was Price who discovered her. We used to laugh at him when he said she had genius. He was right; we were wrong. The other night I was standing in the wings; she was coming down from her dressing-room—she lingered on the stairs, looking the most insignificant little thing you can well imagine; but the moment her cue came a strange light came into her eyes and a strange life was fused in her limbs; she was transformed, and went on the stage a very symbol of passion and romance.'

The slate colour of the sky did not seem to change, and yet the night grew visibly denser in the park; and there had come the sensation of things ended, a movement of wraps thrown over shoulders and thought of bedtime and home. The crowd was moving away, and nearly lost in the darkness Hubert came towards his friends. He had just knocked the ash from his cigar, and as he drew in the smoke the glow of the lighted end fled over his blonde face.