He was kind, and very careful about hurting people’s feelings, when he thought of it, but often he used to forget altogether that anyone was there. He said odd things sometimes, unexpected sort of things, because what he saw struck him in some unexpected light. It would never have occurred to him to say what he said for any other reason.
It used to worry me at one time that Walter did not appreciate Hugo, but that was a long time ago. I see now, and have seen for many years, that they never could have understood each other. They spoke different languages—or rather they used the same words for quite different meanings.
Walter once said:
‘Hugo has charm, certainly, but he is an unsatisfactory fellow. What is there behind all that?’
And another time he said:
‘If Hugo had ever done a good day’s work one would know where one was with him.’
And I could not explain. Hugo did work in his own way constantly, practically all day long, but it was not the kind of work that Walter could recognize or admit. Hugo was living and taking in and trying to understand all the time. If Hugo went for a ride on a bus—afterwards, when we were older—he found drama and beauty and queer exciting romance. He would tell one when he came back sometimes about it. The other people in the bus, people he had looked down on walking in the street, lights and shadows in a fog, sunsets in smoke, everything and anything was exciting and inspiring to Hugo; and some one else might have been the same bus ride and seen nothing at all.
It was not that he was exactly observant, for he wasn’t. Often he noticed nothing when other people did. But he had a world of his own in which he lived a great deal, and sometimes—you never knew when—outside sights and sounds responded to something in it, and there was an illumination, a sudden quickening into life, of all around.
We who knew Hugo and loved him understood this. I don’t think Walter could have been expected to understand; he was too different.