"Oh, I know there won't be room in that," said John, bitterly.
His dressing-case might be considered the medal he had struck in honor of The Fall of Babylon: he had passed it every morning on his way to rehearsals and, dreaming of the triumph that might soon be his, had vowed he would buy it were such a triumph granted. It had cost £75, was heavy enough when empty to strain his wrist and when full to break his back, and it contained more parasites of the toilet table and the writing desk than one could have supposed imaginable. These parasites each possessed an abode of such individual shape that leaving them behind made no difference to the number of really useful articles, like pajamas, that could be carried in the cubic space lined with blue corded silk on which they looked down like the inconvenient houses of a fashionable square. Therefore wherever John went, the fittings went too, a glittering worthless mob of cut-glass, pigskin, tortoiseshell and ivory.
"But in my portmanteau," John persisted. "Won't there be room there?"
"I might squeeze them in," Maud admitted. "It depends what boots you're wanting to take with you, sir."
"Never mind," he sighed. "I can make a separate parcel of them."
"There's the basket what we were going to use for the cat, sir."
"No, I should prefer a brown paper parcel," he decided. It would be improper for the books out of which the historical trappings of his Joan of Arc were to be manufactured to travel in a lying-in hospital for cats.
John left Maud to finish the packing and went downstairs to his library. This double room of fine proportions was, as one might expect from the library of a popular writer, the core—the veritable omphalos of the house; with its fluted pilasters, cream-colored panels and cherub-haunted ceiling, the expanse of city and sky visible from three sedate windows at the south end and the glimpse of a busy Hampstead street caught from those facing north, not to speak of the prismatic rows of books, it was a room worthy of art's most remunerative triumphs, the nursery of inspiration, and, save for a slight suggestion that the Muses sometimes drank afternoon tea there, the room of an indomitable bachelor. When John stepped upon the wreaths, ribbons, and full-blown roses of the threadbare Aubusson rug that floated like gossamer upon a green carpet of Axminster pile as soft as some historic lawn, he was sure that success was not a vacuum. In his now optimistic mood he hoped ultimately to receive from Ambles the kind of congratulatory benediction that the library at Church Row always bestowed upon his footsteps. Indeed, if he had not had such an ambition for his country house, he could scarcely have endured to quit even for a week this library, where fires were burning in two grates and where the smoke of his Partaga was haunting, like a complacent ghost, the imperturbable air. John possessed another library at Ambles, but he had not yet had time to do more than hurriedly stock it with the standard works that he felt no country house should be without. His library in London was the outcome of historical research preparatory to writing his romantic plays; and since all works of popular historical interest are bound with a much more lavish profusion of color and ornament even than the works of fiction to which they most nearly approximate, John's shelves outwardly resembled rather a collection of armor than a collection of books. There were, of course, many books the insides of which were sufficiently valuable to excuse their dingy exterior; but none of these occupied the line, where romance after romance of exiled queens, confession after confession of morganatic wives, memoir after memoir from above and below stairs, together with catch-penny alliterative gatherings as of rude regents and libidinous landgraves flashed in a gorgeous superficiality of gilt and text. In order to amass the necessary material for a play about Joan of Arc John did not concern himself with original documents. He assumed, perhaps rightly, that a Camembert cheese is more palatable and certainly more portable than a herd of unmilked cows. To dramatize the life of Joan of Arc he took from his shelves Saints and Sinners of the Fifteenth Century ... but a catalogue is unnecessary: enough that when the heap of volumes chosen stood upon his desk it glittered like the Maid herself before the walls of Orleans.
"After all," as John had once pointed out in a moment of exasperation to his brother, James, the critic, "Shakespeare didn't sit all day in the reading-room of the British Museum."
An hour later the playwright, equipped alike for country rambles and poetic excursions, was sitting in a first-class compartment of a London and South-Western railway train; two hours after that he was sitting in the Wrottesford fly swishing along between high hazel hedges of golden-brown.