For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new, and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as Pickthall’s and W. H. Hudson’s and the late Stephen Crane’s, reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these writers, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick, are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That question led us so far away from the special Bâle train that we never returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors, imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print…. At every important station there was to be a frightful row about all these people’s tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases…. Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the conductor…. Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter’s own credentials….
Some of Boon’s jokes about this train were, to say the best of them, obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials. Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or mistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions, and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the wagon-restaurant consuming beer enormously and conversing upon immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s charger—Mr. Hewlett himself, I believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons—Mr. Cunninghame Graham’s Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson….
There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities for speculations upon the déshabille of his contemporaries. Much of the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr. Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas, over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr. Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in itself amount to a criticism, I give it here….
How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bâle platform, and got right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face. This surely is no mountebank.
§ 2
Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.
“Why have a president?” Dodd helped.