The Finer Grain | Page 2

found very
charming, but as to which--if it really wouldn't bore Mr. Berridge--he
should so like the verdict of some one who knew. His friend was
awfully ambitious, and he thought there was something in it--with all of
which might he send the book to any address?
Berridge thought of many things while the young Lord thus charged
upon him, and it was odd that no one of them was any question of the
possible worth of the offered achievement--which, for that matter, was
certain to be of the quality of all the books, to say nothing of the plays,
and the projects for plays, with which, for some time past, he had seen
his daily post-bag distended. He had made out, on looking at these
things, no difference at all from one to the other. Here, however, was
something more--something that made his fellow-guest's overture
independently interesting and, as he might imagine, important. He
smiled, he was friendly and vague; said "A work of fiction, I suppose?"
and that he didn't pretend ever to pronounce, that he in fact quite hated,
always, to have to, not "knowing," as he felt, any better than any one
else; but would gladly look at anything, under that demur, if it would
give any pleasure. Perhaps the very brightest and most diamond-like
twinkle he had yet seen the star of his renown emit was just the light
brought into his young Lord's eyes by this so easy consent to oblige. It
was easy because the presence before him was from moment to
moment, referring itself back to some recent observation or memory;
something caught somewhere, within a few weeks or months, as he had
moved about, and that seemed to flutter forth at this stir of the folded
leaves of his recent experience very much as a gathered, faded flower,
placed there for "pressing," might drop from between the pages of a
volume opened at hazard.
He had seen him before, this splendid and sympathetic person--whose
flattering appeal was by no means all that made him sympathetic; he
had met him, had noted, had wondered about him, had in fact
imaginatively, intellectually, so to speak, quite yearned over him, in
some conjunction lately, though ever so fleet-ingly, apprehended:

which circumstance constituted precisely an association as tormenting,
for the few minutes, as it was vague, and set him to sounding, intensely
and vainly, the face that itself figured everything agreeable except
recognition. He couldn't remember, and the young man didn't;
distinctly, yes, they had been in presence, during the previous winter,
by some chance of travel, through Sicily, through Italy, through the
south of France, but his Seigneurie--so Berridge liked exotically to
phrase it--had then (in ignorance of the present reasons) not noticed him.
It was positive for the man of established identity, all the while too, and
through the perfect lucidity of his sense of achievement in an air
"conducting" nothing but the loudest bang, that this was fundamentally
much less remarkable than the fact of his being made up to in such a
quarter now. That was the disservice, in a manner, of one's having so
much imagination: the mysterious values of other types kept looming
larger before you than the doubtless often higher but comparatively
familiar ones of your own, and if you had anything of the artist's real
feeling for life the attraction and amusement of possibilities so
projected were worth more to you, in nineteen moods out of twenty,
than the sufficiency, the serenity, the felicity, whatever it might be, of
your stale personal certitudes. You were intellectually, you were
"artistically" rather abject, in fine, if your curiosity (in the grand sense
of the term) wasn't worth more to you than your dignity. What was
your dignity, "anyway," but just the consistency of your curiosity, and
what moments were ever so ignoble for you as, under the blighting
breath of the false gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your
lapses from that consistency? His Seigneurie, at all events, delightfully,
hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge was talking about,
and the latter felt that if he had been less beautifully witless, and
thereby less true to his right figure, it might scarce have been forgiven
him.
His right figure was that of life in irreflective joy and at the highest
thinkable level of prepared security and unconscious insolence. What
was the pale page of fiction compared with the intimately personal
adventure that, in almost any direction, he would have been all so
stupidly, all so gallantly, all so instinctively and, by every presumption,
so prevailingly ready for? Berridge would have given six months'

"royalties" for even an hour of his looser dormant consciousness--since
one was oneself, after all, no worm, but an heir of all the ages too--and
yet