“And I,” said Southerley, “might get some decent ‘copy’ out of them, I fancy. Shirts for sailors at Jersey and Guernsey; cows at Alderney; rocks, I suppose, at Sark. All interesting things that people are dying to know all about. This is to be thought of, Bayre.”
“What on earth you want to go to any place for in order to write about it I don’t know,” observed Bayre, grimly. “For no matter what you see or what you hear, you always manage to report it under such a veneer of commonplace that nobody would ever think you got your information out of anything more up-to-date than the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica!”
“My dear fellow, when you write for commonplace people you must write in a commonplace way. Now you, who write for the people that read your works—people so uncommon that they don’t exist—can ransack the dictionary for obsolete adjectives and introduce compound words that nobody has ever heard of with impunity.”
“I may not find it easy to get to my public,” said Bayre, in whose dark face a flush was rising, “but when I do it won’t consist of the sweepings of the counter and the stable, or of the representatives of the culture created by Snick-snacks.”
“Look here,” broke in Repton, who perceived that the atmosphere was growing rather sultry, “without any chaff, don’t you think a week’s outing might be got out of this idea? It’s the right time of year, in the first place, to see the islands in their everyday aspect, with no taint of the tourist about them.”
“And the right time of year for an awfully rough sea passage!” observed Southerley, who was not a “good sailor.”
Bayre played with his moustache and reflected.
“When you come to think of it,” said he at last, “it’s not such a bad notion of yours, Repton, that we should go and pay the old gentleman a surprise visit. I’ve never been to the Channel Islands, and a blow across the sea would get rid of some of the cobwebs of this infernal city.”
“Don’t abuse old London, I beg,” said Southerley. “It’s the only place worth living in for a man with any brains in his head.”
Repton and Bayre both turned on him looks of scorn. The fact that he had been, in a small and modest way, successful in those callings of Art and Literature in which they themselves had so far failed—for Southerley had had his sketches reproduced in the not over-particular columns of a Sunday paper—rankled in the breasts of both.