I spelt it to him: he wrote the appointment down on his shirt-cuff. I went to White's the next day and waited an hour, but he did not turn up. I met him three weeks later at a garden-party with his wife. But he appeared to have forgotten me.
Observing old Deleglise's guests, comparing them with their names, it surprised me the disconnection between the worker and the work. Writers of noble sentiment, of elevated ideality, I found contained in men of commonplace appearance, of gross appetites, of conventional ideas. It seemed doubtful whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise's kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried to compete with others who to the public were comparatively unknown. After a time I ceased to confound the artist with the man, thought no more of judging the one by the other than of evolving a tenant from the house to which circumstances or carelessness might have directed him. Clearly they were two creations originally independent of each other, settling down into a working partnership for purposes merely of mutual accommodation; the spirit evidently indifferent as to the particular body into which he crept, anxious only for a place to work in, easily contented.
Varied were these guests that gathered round old Deleglise's oak. Cabinet Ministers reported to be in Homburg; Russian Nihilists escaped from Siberia; Italian revolutionaries; high church dignitaries disguised in grey suitings; ex-errand boys, who had discovered that with six strokes of the pen they could set half London laughing at whom they would; raw laddies with the burr yet clinging to their tongues, but who we knew would one day have the people dancing to the music of their words. Neither wealth, nor birth, nor age, nor position counted. Was a man interesting, amusing; had he ideas and thoughts of his own? Then he was welcome. Men who had come, men who were coming, met there on equal footing. Among them, as years ago among my schoolmates, I found my place—somewhat to my dissatisfaction. I amused. Much rather would I have shocked them by the originality of my views, impressed them with the depth of my judgments. They declined to be startled, refused to be impressed; instead, they laughed. Nor from these men could I obtain sympathy in my disappointment.
“What do you mean, you villain!” roared Deleglise's caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. “How dare you waste your time writing this sort of stuff?”
He had a copy of the paper containing my “Witch of Moel Sarbod” in his hand—then some months old. He screwed it up into a ball and flung it in my face. “I've only just read it. What did you get for it?”
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Nothing!” he screamed. “You got off for nothing? You ought to have been whipped at the cart's tail!”
“Oh, come, it's not as bad as that,” suggested old Deleglise.
“Not bad! There isn't a laugh in it from beginning to end.”
“There wasn't intended to be,” I interrupted.