The stone was very
cold to his feet. There were so many things in the tank that at first, George could not
see the fish, but at last he saw it gleaming below the moon and the
stars, larger and even more beautiful than he had said. "I knew I
was right," he whispered, as he crept back to bed. In the morning he
was very ill. Meanwhile blue day succeeded blue day, and while the water grew lower
in the tank, the children, with Jimmy for leader, had almost forgotten
the boy who had told them stories. Now and again one or other of them
would say that George was very, very ill, and then they would go on
with their game. No one looked in the tank now that they knew there
was nothing in it, till it occurred one day to Jimmy that the dry
weather should have brought final confirmation of his scepticism. Leaving his comrades at the long jump, he went to George's neglected
corner and peeped into the tank. Sure enough it was almost dry, and,
he nearly shouted with surprise, in the shallow pool of sooty water
there lay a large fish, dead, but still gleaming with rainbow colours. Jimmy was strong and stupid, but not ill-natured, and, recalling
George's illness, it occurred to him that it would be a decent thing
to go and tell him he was right. He ran downstairs and knocked on the
door of the flat where George lived. George's big sister opened
it, but the boy was too excited to see that her eyes were wet. "Oh,
miss," he said breathlessly, "tell George he was right about the fish. I've seen it myself!" "Georgy's dead," said the girl. The Great Man

To the people who do not write it must seem odd that men and women
should be willing to sacrifice their lives in the endeavour to
find new arrangements and combinations of words with which to
express old thoughts and older emotions, yet that is not an unfair
statement of the task of the literary artist. Words--symbols that
represent the noises that human beings make with their tongues and
lips and teeth--lie within our grasp like the fragments of a
jig-saw puzzle, and we fit them into faulty pictures until our hands
grow weary and our eyes can no longer pretend to see the truth. In
order to illustrate an infinitesimal fraction of our lives by
means of this preposterous game we are willing to sacrifice all
the rest. While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the
promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the
tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting
epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods with
beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look into the
eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. Love is an
occasion for songs; Death but the overburdened father of all our
saddest phrases. We are of those who are born crying into the
world because they cannot speak, and we end, like Stevenson, by
looking forward to our death because we have written a good
epitaph. Sometimes in the course of our frequent descents from
heaven to the waste-paper basket we feel that we lose too much to
accomplish so little. Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh
the smile of a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate
the author for months of lost adventure? We have only one life to
live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the history of
dead hours. Our lives lack balance because we find it hard to
discover a mean between the triolet we wrote last I night and the
big book we are going to start tomorrow, and also because living
only with our heads we tend to become top-heavy. We justify our
present discomfort with the promise of a bright future of flowers
and sunshine and gladdest life, though we know that in the garden
of art there are many chrysalides and few butterflies. Few of us
are fortunate enough to accomplish anything that was in the least
worth doing, so we fall back on the arid philosophy that it is
effort alone that counts. Luckily--or suicide would be the rule rather than the exception
for artists--the long process of disillusionment is broken by
hours when even the most self-critical feel nobly and indubitably
great; and this is the only reward that most artists ever have for
their labours, if we set a higher price on art than money. On the
whole, I am inclined to think that the artist is fully rewarded,
for the common man can have no conception of the Joy that is to be
found in belonging, though but momentarily and illusively, to the
aristocracy of genius. To find the just word for all our emotions,
to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative,
to feel that it is our lot to keep life's gladdest promises, to
see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as
stars in a windless pool--these, indeed, are no ordinary
pleasures. Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow
us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with
bitteress. We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer
for our rare adventure. We have been permitted to explore the
ultimate possibilities of our nature, and if we might not keep
this newly-discovered territory, at least we did not return from
our travels with empty hands. Something of the glamour lingers,
something perhaps of the wisdom, and it is with a heightened
passion, a fiercer enthusiasm, that we set ourselves once more to
our life-long task of chalking pink salmon and pinker sunsets on
the pavements of the world. I once met an Englishman in the forest that starts outside Brussels
and stretches for a long day's journey across the hills. We found a
little café under the trees, and sat in the sun talking about modern
English literature all the afternoon. In this way we discovered that
we had a common standpoint from which we judged works of art, though
our judgments differed pleasantly and provided us with materials
for agreeable discussion. By the time we had divided three bottles of
Gueze Lambic, the noble beer of Belgium, we had already sketched out a
scheme for the ideal literary newspaper. In other words, we had
achieved friendship. When the afternoon grew suddenly cold, the Englishman led me off to
tea at his house, which was half-way up the hill out of Woluwe. It
was one of those modern country cottages that Belgian architects
steal openly and without shame from their English confreres. We were
met at the garden gate by his daughter, a dark-haired girl of
fifteen or sixteen, so unreasonably beautiful that she made a
disillusioned scribbler feel like a sad line out of one of the
saddest poems of Francis Thompson. In my mind I christened her
Monica, because I did not like her real name. The house, with its
old furniture, its library, where the choice of books was clearly
dictated by individual prejudices and affections, and its
unambitious parade of domestic happiness, heightened my melancholy. While tea was being prepared Monica showed me the garden.