"The sunshine climbs the wall behind him, creeps stealthily across the ceiling of the room, slips out softly by the window, leaving him alone. All these years he had been living with a fellow poet. They should have been comrades, and they had never spoken. Why had she hidden herself? Why had she left him, never revealing herself? Years ago, when they were first married―he remembers now―she had slipped little blue-bound copy-books into his pocket, laughing, blushing, asking him to read them. How could he have guessed? Of course, he had forgotten them. Later, they had disappeared again; it had never occurred to him to think. Often in the earlier days she had tried to talk to him about his work. Had he but looked into her eyes, he might have understood. But she had always been so homely-seeming, so good. Who would have suspected? Then suddenly the blood rushes into his face. What must have been her opinion of his work? All these years he had imagined her the amazed devotee, uncomprehending but admiring. He had read to her at times, comparing himself the while with Moliere reading to his cook. What right had she to play this trick upon him? The folly of it! The pity of it! He would have been so glad of her."
"What becomes, I wonder," mused the Philosopher, "of the thoughts that are never spoken? We know that in Nature nothing is wasted; the very cabbage is immortal, living again in altered form. A thought published or spoken we can trace, but such must only be a small percentage. It often occurs to me walking down the street. Each man and woman that I pass by, each silently spinning his silken thought, short or long, fine or coarse. What becomes of it?"
"I heard you say once," remarked the Old Maid to the Minor Poet, "that 'thoughts are in the air,' that the poet but gathers them as a child plucks wayside blossoms to shape them into nosegays."
"It was in confidence," replied the Minor Poet. "Please do not let it get about, or my publisher will use it as an argument for cutting down my royalties."
"I have always remembered it," answered the Old Maid. "It seemed so true. A thought suddenly comes to you. I think of them sometimes, as of little motherless babes creeping into our brains for shelter."
"It is a pretty idea," mused the Minor Poet. "I shall see them in the twilight: pathetic little round-eyed things of goblin shape, dimly luminous against the darkening air. Whence come you, little tender Thought, tapping at my brain? From the lonely forest, where the peasant mother croons above the cradle while she knits? Thought of Love and Longing: lies your gallant father with his boyish eyes unblinking underneath some tropic sun? Thought of Life and Thought of Death: are you of patrician birth, cradled by some high-born maiden, pacing slowly some sweet garden? Or did you spring to life amid the din of loom or factory? Poor little nameless foundlings! I shall feel myself in future quite a philanthropist, taking them in, adopting them."
"You have not yet decided," reminded him the Woman of the World, "which you really are: the gentleman we get for three and sixpence net, or the one we are familiar with, the one we get for nothing."
"Please don't think I am suggesting any comparison," continued the Woman of the World, "but I have been interested in the question since George joined a Bohemian club and has taken to bringing down minor celebrities from Saturday to Monday. I hope I am not narrow-minded, but there is one gentleman I have been compelled to put my foot down on."
"I really do not think he will complain," I interrupted. The Woman of the World possesses, I should explain, the daintiest of feet.
"It is heavier than you think," replied the Woman of the World. "George persists I ought to put up with him because he is a true poet. I cannot admit the argument. The poet I honestly admire. I like to have him about the place. He lies on my drawing-room table in white vellum, and helps to give tone to the room. For the poet I am quite prepared to pay the four-and-six demanded; the man I don't want. To be candid, he is not worth his own discount."
"It is hardly fair," urged the Minor Poet, "to confine the discussion to poets. A friend of mine some years ago married one of the most charming women in New York, and that is saying a good deal. Everybody congratulated him, and at the outset he was pleased enough with himself. I met him two years later in Geneva, and we travelled together as far as Rome. He and his wife scarcely spoke to one another the whole journey, and before I left him he was good enough to give me advice which to another man might be useful. 'Never marry a charming woman,' he counselled me. 'Anything more unutterably dull than "the charming woman" outside business hours you cannot conceive.'"
"I think we must agree to regard the preacher," concluded the Philosopher, "merely as a brother artist. The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer, but his voice stirs our souls. The preacher holds aloft his banner of purity. He waves it over his own head as much as over the heads of those around him. He does not cry with the Master, 'Come to Me,' but 'Come with me, and be saved.' The prayer 'Forgive them' was the prayer not of the Priest, but of the God. The prayer dictated to the Disciples was 'Forgive us,' 'Deliver us.' Not that he should be braver, not that he should be stronger than they that press behind him, is needed of the leader, but that he should know the way. He, too, may faint, he, too, may fall; only he alone must never turn his back."
"It is quite comprehensible, looked at from one point of view," remarked the Minor Poet, "that he who gives most to others should himself be weak. The professional athlete pays, I believe, the price of central weakness. It is a theory of mine that the charming, delightful people one meets with in society are people who have dishonestly kept to themselves gifts entrusted to them by Nature for the benefit of the whole community. Your conscientious, hard-working humorist is in private life a dull dog. The dishonest trustee of laughter, on the other hand, robbing the world of wit bestowed upon him for public purposes, becomes a brilliant conversationalist."
"But," added the Minor Poet, turning to me, "you were speaking of a man named Longrush, a great talker."
"A long talker," I corrected. "My cousin mentioned him third in her list of invitations. 'Longrush,' she said with conviction, 'we must have Longrush.' 'Isn't he rather tiresome?' I suggested. 'He is tiresome,' she agreed, 'but then he's so useful. He never lets the conversation drop.'"
"Why is it?" asked the Minor Poet. "Why, when we meet together, must we chatter like a mob of sparrows? Why must every assembly to be successful sound like the parrot-house of a zoological garden?"
"I remember a parrot story," I said, "but I forget who told it to me."
"Maybe one of us will remember as you go on," suggested the Philosopher.
"A man," I said―"an old farmer, if I remember rightly―had read a lot of parrot stories, or had heard them at the club. As a result he thought he would like himself to be the owner of a parrot, so journeyed to a dealer and, according to his own account, paid rather a long price for a choice specimen. A week later he re-entered the shop, the parrot borne behind him by a boy. 'This bird,' said the farmer, 'this bird you sold me last week ain't worth a sovereign!' 'What's the matter with it?' demanded the dealer. 'How do I know what's the matter with the bird?' answered the farmer. 'What I tell you is that it ain't worth a sovereign―'tain' t worth a half a sovereign!' 'Why not?' persisted the dealer; 'it talks all right, don't it?' 'Talks!' retorted the indignant farmer, 'the damn thing talks all day, but it never says anything funny!'"
"A friend of mine," said the Philosopher, "once had a parrot―"
"Won't you come into the garden?" said the Woman of the World, rising and leading the way.