Trelawny returned with Shelley and Mary. “How different Byron is to anything one expects of him!” said he. “There’s no mystery about him at all. On the contrary he talks too freely, and says things he had much better not say. He seems as jealous and impulsive as a woman, and maybe is more dangerous.”
“Mary,” said Shelley, “Trelawny has found out Byron already. How stupid we were—how long it took us.”
“The reason is,” said Mary, “that Trelawny lives with the living, and we live with the dead.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE DISCIPLES
The sailor who had come to Pisa to admire two great men found that it was he, on the contrary, who was admired by them. It is true that when Trelawny was absent, Byron said of him: “If we could get him to wash his hands and not to tell lies, we might make a gentleman of him,” but when he was present Byron treated him with the greatest respect. Like all artists, Byron and Shelley wrote in order to console themselves for not living, and a man of action appeared to these two men of dreams as a strange and enviable phenomenon.
Shelley consulted Trelawny as to nautical terms, and drew with him, on the sandy shores of the Arno, keels, sails, and sea-charts. “I’ve missed my vocation,” said he. “I ought to have been a sailor.”
“A man who neither smokes nor swears can never be a sailor,” Trelawny told him.
Byron, an imaginary corsair, would have liked to learn from a real corsair the ways and customs of the brotherhood, and did his utmost in Trelawny’s company to talk in cynical and bravado fashion. Trelawny, quick to perceive his influence over Byron, tried to make use of it in the service of Shelley.
“You know,” said he as they rode together one day, “that you might help Shelley a good deal at small cost by a friendly word or two in your next work, such as you have given to other writers of much less merit.”
“All trades have their secrets,” Byron answered. “If we crack up a popular author, he repays us in the same coin, capital and interest. But Shelley! A bad investment. . . . Who reads the Snake? . . . Besides, if he cast off the slough of his mystifying metaphysics, he would want no puffing.”