Then, as his short-sighted eyes penetrated yet more clearly he saw—— Could it be? Indeed it was. His heart beat quickly. There seated uncomfortably upon an orange chair from Heal's was no less a person than the great K. Wiggs himself. Henry had seen him on two other occasions, had once indeed spoken to him.
That earlier glorious moment was strong with him now, the thrill of it, the almost passionate excitement of touching that small podgy hand, the very hand that had written Mr. Whippet and Old Cain and Abel and The Slumber Family.
What then to-night had happened to Henry? Why was it that with every longing to recover that earlier thrill he could not? Why was it that again, as just now with the Three Graces, he could see only Mr. Wiggs's physical presence and nothing at all of his splendid and aspiring soul? Mr. Wiggs certainly did not look his best on an orange chair with a stiff back.
And then surely he had fattened and coarsened, even since Henry's last vision of him? His squat figure perched on the chair, his little fat legs crossed, his bulging stomach, his two chins, his ragged moustache, his eyes coloured a faint purple, his thin whispy hair—these things did not speak for beauty. Nor did the voice that penetrated through the clamour to Henry's corner, with its shrill piping clamour, give full reassurance.
It was not, no alas, it was not the voice of a just soul; there was, moreover, a snuffle behind the pipe—that spoke of adenoids—it is very hard to reconcile adenoids with greatness.
And yet Wiggs was a great man! You knew that if only by the virulence with which certain sections of the press attacked him whenever he made a public appearance.
He was a great man. He is a great man. Henry repeated the words over to himself with a desperate determination to recover the earlier rapture. He had written great books; he was even then writing them. He was, as Henry knew, a kindly man, a generous man, a man with noble and generous ambitions, a man honest in his resolves and courageous in his utterances. Why then did he look like that and why was Henry so stupidly conscious of his body and of his body only? Could it be that the adventure of the afternoon had filled his young soul with so high and splendid an ideal of beauty that everything else in the world was sordid and ugly? He moved restlessly. He did not want to think life sordid and ugly. But was this life? Or at any rate was it not simply a very, very small part of life? Was he moving at last from a small ante-room into a large and spacious chamber? (I have said before that picturesque images occurred to him with the utmost frequency.)
He caught fragments of conversation. A lady quite close to him was saying—"But there's no Form in the thing—no Form at all. He hadn't thought the thing out—it's all just anyhow. . . ."
Somewhere else he heard a man's deep bass voice—"Oh, he's no good. He'll always be an amateur. Of course it's obvious you miss truth the moment you go outside the narrator's brain. Now Truth . . ."
And Wigg's shrill pipe—"Ow, no. That isn't History. That's fable. What do facts matter?"