I need scarcely say that when I went to London I did not seek out Houghton, who had settled down in the Metropolis some months before me. But we met in the Strand, he wearing a fur-lined overcoat and looking a trifle like H. B. Irving, and I carrying a load of review books under my arm. We looked at each other; we hesitated; we stopped. Stanley was a trifle languid and, after a few inconsequent remarks, he began telling me the history of his fur overcoat. He had, he said, bought it for five pounds or seven pounds, or some such ridiculously low price, and he had bought it second-hand.
[67]
]And (Fate wills these things) whenever I hear the name Stanley Houghton I think of that rather tall, rather aristocratic, figure in the Strand wearing its second-hand fur-lined overcoat and talking, with embarrassment, about nothing in particular, standing first on one foot and then on the other.
It is, of course, impossible to predict with certainty what further successes Houghton would have achieved had he lived, but there can be little doubt that his sharp and lively talents would have produced plays even more noticeable than Hindle Wakes. A little more experience of life would probably have shown him the futility and the destructive effects of his intellectual snobbery. He was raw and crude, and success did not mellow or enlarge him.
[68]
]CHAPTER VI
SOME WRITERS
Arnold Bennett—G. K. Chesterton—Lascelles Abercrombie—Harold Monro—John Masefield—Jerome K. Jerome—Sir Owen Seaman—A. A. Milne
Of all the famous writers I have met, I have found Arnold Bennett the most surprising. I do not know what kind of man I expected to see when it was arranged that I should meet him, but I certainly had not anticipated beholding the curiously, wrongly dressed figure that, one spring afternoon some few years ago, walked up the steps leading from the floor of Queen’s Hall to the foyer of the gallery. I was there by appointment. I was a friend of a friend of his—Havergal Brian, a young fire-eating genius from the Potteries, and Brian had planned this curious meeting. It was during the interval of an afternoon concert of a Richard Strauss Festival, and Ackté was singing.
Bennett was rather short, thin, hollow-eyed, prominent-toothed. He wore a white waistcoat and a billycock hat very much awry, and he had a manner of complete self-assurance. I cannot say that I was unimpressed. We were introduced, and he looked at me drowsily, indifferently, insultingly indifferently. He did not speak and I, nervous, and a little bewildered by the colour of his socks, which I at that moment noticed for the first time, blundered into some futility.
“I don’t see why,” said Bennett, in response.
I didn’t either, so far as that went. Desperately uncomfortable, I looked round for Brian, and saw [69] ]him standing fifteen yards or so away, grinning malignantly.
So I plunged into a new topic—with even more disastrous results.