All the way home John discoursed on Art. Phyllis drank it in. She thought him a wonderful being.
"The trouble with these literary chaps is that they revolve in a circle," he declared, posing securely on his new pedestal. "They have their writing rooms, all strewn with carefully disarranged paraphernalia; and they have their clubs, where they meet only each other and praise each other's work, and damn the work of the absent ones: and they go prowling about looking for a bohemia that never existed, and can never exist for them; for bohemia is simply youth and poverty and high aspirations, combined, and can't be found by search. If these literary chaps are exceptionally fortunate, they are invited to great houses, where they dine with stupid, overfed people who pretend they have read their books, though they haven't, unless they are unfit to read. And so they go on wearily turning that treadmill—and wonder why their work has lost freshness, and convince themselves it has gained style. I am not a literary chap, and I don't wish to be one. I am a poet. Poetry is my profession. And the only way I can succeed in it, the only way it is worth succeeding in, is to relate it to life, real life, the big, elemental struggle for existence that is going on, here in London, and everywhere; to wed Art to Reality, lest the jade saunter the streets, a light o' love, seeking to sell her soul."
As they walked past the bookshop, and through the little square, John said:—
"I should like to live in London eight months of the year, and give most of my time to Saint Ruth's. And the rest of the year I should like to live in a village, like Rosemary, Sussex, where I lived as a boy; on the outskirts of a little village, near the green country; and do my writing there, under the blue sky—with God looking over my shoulder, to see the work well done."
XI
There was a motor-car in front of the house; its blinding lights illuminated the windows at the other end of the square.
Mrs. Farquharson met them at the door.
"He's upstairs in your room. Sir Peter Oglebay—your uncle," she said, in an excited whisper. "Three times he has called this day; once at eleven, once at two; and now again at six. 'Sit down and wait,' I says to him, the last time; 'they will surely be home for dinner; never have they missed since first they came,' says I; and sit down he did—and there he sits; and doesn't he look noble, sitting there! Genevieve's that nervous she drops everything she touches."
John and Phyllis exchanged looks. He smiled as easily as he could.