There were so many things in the tank that at first, George could not see the fish, but at last he saw it gleaming below the moon and the stars, larger and even more beautiful than he had said. "I knew I was right," he whispered, as he crept back to bed. In the morning he was very ill.
Meanwhile blue day succeeded blue day, and while the water grew lower in the tank, the children, with Jimmy for leader, had almost forgotten the boy who had told them stories. Now and again one or other of them would say that George was very, very ill, and then they would go on with their game. No one looked in the tank now that they knew there was nothing in it, till it occurred one day to Jimmy that the dry weather should have brought final confirmation of his scepticism. Leaving his comrades at the long jump, he went to George's neglected corner and peeped into the tank. Sure enough it was almost dry, and, he nearly shouted with surprise, in the shallow pool of sooty water there lay a large fish, dead, but still gleaming with rainbow colours.
Jimmy was strong and stupid, but not ill-natured, and, recalling George's illness, it occurred to him that it would be a decent thing to go and tell him he was right. He ran downstairs and knocked on the door of the flat where George lived. George's big sister opened it, but the boy was too excited to see that her eyes were wet. "Oh, miss," he said breathlessly, "tell George he was right about the fish. I've seen it myself!"
"Georgy's dead," said the girl.
The Great Man
To the people who do not write it must seem odd that men and women should be willing to sacrifice their lives in the endeavour to find new arrangements and combinations of words with which to express old thoughts and older emotions, yet that is not an unfair statement of the task of the literary artist. Words—symbols that represent the noises that human beings make with their tongues and lips and teeth—lie within our grasp like the fragments of a jig-saw puzzle, and we fit them into faulty pictures until our hands grow weary and our eyes can no longer pretend to see the truth. In order to illustrate an infinitesimal fraction of our lives by means of this preposterous game we are willing to sacrifice all the rest. While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods with beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look into the eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. Love is an occasion for songs; Death but the overburdened father of all our saddest phrases. We are of those who are born crying into the world because they cannot speak, and we end, like Stevenson, by looking forward to our death because we have written a good epitaph. Sometimes in the course of our frequent descents from heaven to the waste-paper basket we feel that we lose too much to accomplish so little. Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh the smile of a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate the author for months of lost adventure? We have only one life to live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the history of dead hours. Our lives lack balance because we find it hard to discover a mean between the triolet we wrote last I night and the big book we are going to start tomorrow, and also because living only with our heads we tend to become top-heavy. We justify our present discomfort with the promise of a bright future of flowers and sunshine and gladdest life, though we know that in the garden of art there are many chrysalides and few butterflies. Few of us are fortunate enough to accomplish anything that was in the least worth doing, so we fall back on the arid philosophy that it is effort alone that counts.
Luckily—or suicide would be the rule rather than the exception for artists—the long process of disillusionment is broken by hours when even the most self-critical feel nobly and indubitably great; and this is the only reward that most artists ever have for their labours, if we set a higher price on art than money. On the whole, I am inclined to think that the artist is fully rewarded, for the common man can have no conception of the Joy that is to be found in belonging, though but momentarily and illusively, to the aristocracy of genius. To find the just word for all our emotions, to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative, to feel that it is our lot to keep life's gladdest promises, to see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as stars in a windless pool—these, indeed, are no ordinary pleasures. Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with bitteress. We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer for our rare adventure. We have been permitted to explore the ultimate possibilities of our nature, and if we might not keep this newly-discovered territory, at least we did not return from our travels with empty hands. Something of the glamour lingers, something perhaps of the wisdom, and it is with a heightened passion, a fiercer enthusiasm, that we set ourselves once more to our life-long task of chalking pink salmon and pinker sunsets on the pavements of the world.
I once met an Englishman in the forest that starts outside Brussels and stretches for a long day's journey across the hills. We found a little café under the trees, and sat in the sun talking about modern English literature all the afternoon. In this way we discovered that we had a common standpoint from which we judged works of art, though our judgments differed pleasantly and provided us with materials for agreeable discussion. By the time we had divided three bottles of Gueze Lambic, the noble beer of Belgium, we had already sketched out a scheme for the ideal literary newspaper. In other words, we had achieved friendship.
When the afternoon grew suddenly cold, the Englishman led me off to tea at his house, which was half-way up the hill out of Woluwe. It was one of those modern country cottages that Belgian architects steal openly and without shame from their English confreres. We were met at the garden gate by his daughter, a dark-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, so unreasonably beautiful that she made a disillusioned scribbler feel like a sad line out of one of the saddest poems of Francis Thompson. In my mind I christened her Monica, because I did not like her real name. The house, with its old furniture, its library, where the choice of books was clearly dictated by individual prejudices and affections, and its unambitious parade of domestic happiness, heightened my melancholy. While tea was being prepared Monica showed me the garden. Only a few daffodils and crocuses were in bloom, but she led me to the rose garden, and told me that in the summer she could pick a great basket of roses every day. I pictured Monica to myself, gathering her roses on a breathless summer afternoon, and returned to the house feeling like a battened version of the Reverend Laurence Sterne. I knew that I had gathered all my roses, and I thought regretfully of the chill loneliness of the world that lay beyond the limits of this paradise.
This mood lingered with me during tea, and it was not till that meal was over that the miracle happened. I do not know whether it was the Englishman or his wife that wrought the magic: or perhaps it was Monica, nibbling "speculations" with her sharp white teeth; but at all events I was led with delicate diplomacy to talk about myself, and I presently realised that I was performing the grateful labour really well. My words were warmed into life by an eloquence that is not ordinarily mine, my adjectives were neither commonplace nor far-fetched, my adverbs fell into their sockets with a sob of joy. I spoke of myself with a noble sympathy, a compassion so intense that it seemed divinely altruistic. And gradually, as the spirit of creation woke in my blood, I revealed, trembling between a natural sensitiveness and a generous abandonment of restraint, the inner life of a man of genius.