‘There’s a bath behind that
door over there,’ he whispered, ‘or if you like I’m off for a bathe in
the Widder. It’s a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,’ and the head
was withdrawn. ‘Don’t put much on,’ came the voice at the panel; ‘we’ll
be home again in twenty minutes.’

The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for
overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were
hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops,
so clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour
they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a
clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs
of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with
thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water
poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams. ‘My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his
mind’s eye when he wrote the “Decameron.” There really is something
almost classic in those pines. And I’d sometimes swear with my eyes
just out of the water I’ve seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between
those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns
have made, and missed!’

The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over
his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its
blazing surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful
enchantment to wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the
dull and tarnished days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that
stained bundle of inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into
a cupboard remoter even than Bluebeard’s, and lock the door, and drop
the quickly-rusting key into these living waters! He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and
thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But,
like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate
burst of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back
to that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone
from which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a
more ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which
confronted him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken
chaps, that angular chin. And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within
that other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of
himself, so beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as
smoke, scarcely less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the
sinister darkness of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had
by some strange miracle managed to repel. ‘Work in,’ the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober
earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it
might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself
as struggling on at all. But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier’s had him just now in
safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him
talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books. ‘The point is,’ he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive
archipelago of precious ‘finds,’ with his foot hoisted onto a chair and
a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, ‘I honestly detest the
mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don’t
deny Life’s there,’ he swept his hand towards the open window—‘in that
frantic Tophet we call London; but there’s no focus, no point of
vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled
medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our
tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the
world’s nectar is merely honeydew.’ He smiled pleasantly into the fixed
vacancy of his visitor’s face. ‘That’s why I’ve just gone on,’ he
continued amiably, ‘collecting this particular kind of stuff—what you
might call riff-raff. There’s not a book here, Lawford, that hasn’t at
least a glimmer of the real thing in it—just Life, seen through a
living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that
gallimaufry, don’t fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint
of genius in his making.’

‘But surely,’ said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend to
himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the
delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower
upon Herbert, ‘surely genius is a very rare thing!’

‘Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up
in a book it’s got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine
yourself Falstaff, and if there weren’t hundreds of Falstaffs in every
generation, to be examples of his ungodly life, he’d be as dead as a
doornail to-morrow—imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so, sitting
down to write “Henry IV,” or “The Merry Wives.” It’s simply
preposterous. You wouldn’t be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere
Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an
observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and
swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Whereas, surely, though you mustn’t let me bore you with all this
piffle, it’s Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented
reporter. ‘Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio—they live on their own, as it were. The
newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see
it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever _watched_
tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the
streets! You jostle them at every corner. There’s a Polonius in every
first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are
boarding-schools. What the devil are _you_, my dear chap, but genius
itself, with all the world brand new upon your shoulders? And who’d
have thought it of you ten days ago? ‘It’s simply and solely because we’re all, poor wretches, dumb—dumb as
butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am,
trickling out this—this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper does
Sappho. But that’s what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich
everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind
these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no
mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts
and vagabonds—and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print,
I can tell you. We’re all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged
with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until—until the
touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there’s no mistaking it; oh
no!’

‘But what,’ said Lawford uneasily, ‘what on earth do you mean by the
touch?’

‘I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery
too. When you squeeze through to the other side.