He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. "We people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don"t you think so?"
"Not--not exceptionally," she said.
"Exceptionally," he insisted.
"It isn"t my impression," she said. "You"re--franker."
"But someone was telling me--you"ve been taking impressions of us lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air.
Somebody--was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?--was saying you"d come out looking for Intellectual Heroes--and found Bernard Shaw.... But what could you have expected?"
"I"ve been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. I want ideas."
"It"s disheartening, isn"t it?"
"It"s--perplexing sometimes."
"You go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of Movements, and you want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? Get at the wonderful core of it?"
"One feels there are things going on."
"Great illuminating things."
"Well--yes."
"And when you see those great Thinkers and Teachers and Guides and Brave Spirits and High Brows generally----"
He laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking pheasant.
"Oh, take it away," he cried sharply.
"We"ve all been through that illusion, Lady Harman," he went on.
"But I don"t like to think----Aren"t Great Men after all--great?"
"In their ways, in their places--Yes. But not if you go up to them and look at them. Not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... What a time of disillusionment you must have had!
"You see, Lady Harman," he said, leaning back from his empty plate, inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy tone; "it"s in the very nature of things that we--if I may put myself into the list--we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and untrustworthy and disappointing men. Rotters--to speak plain contemporary English. If you come to think of it, it has to be so."
"But----" she protested.
He met her eye firmly. "It has to be."
"Why?"
"The very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous, inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and--all that sort of thing, make its producers--if you will forgive the word again--rotters."
She smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.
"Sensitive nervous tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his words. "Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost uncontrollable, expressiveness; that"s what you want in your literary man."
"Yes," said Lady Harman following cautiously. "Yes, I suppose it is."
"Can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to self-control, to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a trustworthy man?... Of course you can"t. And so we _aren"t_ trustworthy, we _aren"t_ consistent. Our virtues are our vices.... _My_ life," said Mr. Wilkins still more confidentially, "won"t bear examination. But that"s by the way. It need not concern us now."
"But Mr. Brumley?" she asked on the spur of the moment.
"I"m not talking of him," said Wilkins with careless cruelty. "He"s restrained. I mean the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who let themselves go. You see now why they are rotten, why they must be rotten. (No! No! take it away. I"m talking.) I feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing--and for the matter of that, art generally--that I set my face steadily against all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make Figures of us. We aren"t Figures, Lady Harman; it isn"t our line. Of all the detestable aspects of the Victorian period surely that disposition to make Figures of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. Respectable Figures--Examples to the young. The suppressions, the coverings up that had to go on, the white-washing of d.i.c.kens,--who was more than a bit of a rip, you know, the concealment of Thackeray"s mistresses. Did you know he had mistresses? Oh rather! And so on. It"s like that bust of Jove--or Bacchus was it?--they pa.s.s off as Plato, who probably looked like any other literary Grub. That"s why I won"t have anything to do with these Academic developments that my friend Brumley--Do you know him by the way?--goes in for. He"s the third man down----You _do_ know him. And he"s giving up the Academic Committee, is he? I"m glad he"s seen it at last. What _is_ the good of trying to have an Academy and all that, and put us in uniform and make out we are Somebodies, and respectable enough to be shaken hands with by George and Mary, when as a matter of fact we are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous scandals----We _must_ be. Bacon, Shakespear, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley--all the stars.... No, Johnson wasn"t a star, he was a character by Boswell.... Oh! great things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of wonder and hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but that"s no reason why--why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms into the soup, is it? Perfectly fair image. (No, take it away.)"
He paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking.
"And you see even if our temperaments didn"t lead inevitably to our--dipping rather, we should still have to--_dip_. Asking a writer or a poet to be seemly and Academic and so on, is like asking an eminent surgeon to be stringently decent. It"s--you see, it"s incompatible. Now a king or a butler or a family solicitor--if you like."
He paused again.
Lady Harman had been following him with an attentive reluctance.
"But what are we to do," she asked, "we people who are puzzled by life, who want guidance and ideas and--help, if--if all the people we look to for ideas are----"
"Bad characters."
"Well,--it"s your theory, you know--bad characters?"
Wilkins answered with the air of one who carefully disentangles a complex but quite solvable problem. "It doesn"t follow," he said, "that because a man is a bad character he"s not to be trusted in matters where character--as we commonly use the word--doesn"t come in. These sensitives, these--would you mind if I were to call myself an aeolian Harp?--these aeolian Harps; they can"t help responding to the winds of heaven. Well,--listen to them. Don"t follow them, don"t worship them, don"t even honour them, but listen to them. Don"t let anyone stop them from saying and painting and writing and singing what they want to.
Freedom, canvas and attention, those are the proper honours for the artist, the poet and the philosopher. Listen to the noise they make, watch the stuff they produce, and presently you will find certain things among the mult.i.tude of things that are said and shown and put out and published, something--light in _your_ darkness--a writer for you, something for you. n.o.body can have a greater contempt for artists and writers and poets and philosophers than I, oh! a squalid crew they are, mean, jealous, pugnacious, disgraceful in love, _disgraceful_--but out of it all comes the greatest serenest thing, the mind of the world, Literature. Nasty little midges, yes,--but fireflies--carrying light for the darkness."
His face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. He stopped abruptly and glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of turning to them again. "If I go on," he said with a voice suddenly dropped, "I shall talk loud."
"You know," said Lady Harman, in a halty undertone, "you--you are too hard upon--upon clever people, but it is true. I mean it is true in a way...."
"Go on, I understand exactly what you are saying."
"I mean, there _are_ ideas. It"s just that, that is so--so----I mean they seem never to be just there and always to be present."
"Like G.o.d. Never in the flesh--now. A spirit everywhere. You think exactly as I do, Lady Harman. It is just that. This is a great time, so great that there is no chance for great men. Every chance for great work. And we"re doing it. There is a wind--blowing out of heaven. And when beautiful people like yourself come into things----"
"I try to understand," she said. "I want to understand. I want--I want not to miss life."
He was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes wandered down the table and he stopped short.
He ended his talk as he had begun it with "Bother! Lady Tarvrille, Lady Harman, is trying to catch your eye."
Lady Harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile.
Wilkins caught at his chair and stood up.
"It would have been jolly to have talked some more," he said.
"I hope we shall."
"Well!" said Wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was swept away from him.