XIII
SUNT CERTI DENIQUE FINES
“WHAT will the next story be about?” said the publisher. “I’m not sure that I shall publish the book at all if it’s about Swedish trolls and Genevese cats. Couldn’t you write about something British—a gnome who made 94 not out for Surrey and then went home and drank a bottle of stout?” “I not only can,” said the author, “but I immediately will.”
“There was once,” said the author, “a sprite who thought goloshes and hot water bottles unmanly. He preferred east winds and colds in the head, and being strong and silent (though he sneezed a good deal from time to time), and though he was a pagan himself, he could respect Christianity in others. His name was Puck; he lived at Bexhill.”
“I have been expecting this for some time,” broke in the publisher; “all you do is to take other people’s noble conceptions and distort them. Disguising plagiarism as travesty, you seek to impose on the public. But let me tell you, sir, in the words of the Latin poet, ‘Sunt certi denique fines.’”
“I am sorry to have given offence,” said the author, “particularly as I would have wished to sketch a new version of Puck’s life, when as a result of continued exposure to draughts in what the Americans taught him to call God’s Great Out-at-Elbows he contracted a vivid form of rheumatism. So crippled, he devoted his declining years to Worthing and the pleasures of a bath chair. Not unnaturally in these circumstances he developed a horror of Sussex and of children, and found his only remaining happiness in reading the poems of Mr. Edward Shanks to the local clergy. When he died, as he did shortly after this——”
“I am only surprised,” interrupted the publisher bitterly, “that the clergy survived.”
“Oh,” said the author, “they did not survive long. It is true that their counsel at the trial urged that it was justifiable homicide in self-defence, but the judge quite properly pointed out in his summing-up that they needn’t have listened. But I can see,” went on the author, “that this is not the sort of story of which you were in need. Let me therefore recount to you the true story of Jack and the Beanstalk.”
“I hope that it is not very long,” said the publisher.