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It was a beautiful room. The long, high windows, veiled now with deep blue curtains, looked out across the strip of water and the green levels of the Park. The ceiling was dark blue; the length of the room on the side opposite the windows was lined with unbroken rows of bookshelves, pale ivory in colour. The fireplace was between the windows.

There was no room for pictures. One etching--Rembrandt's 'Three Crosses'--hung over the fireplace. Beneath it was an Epstein head of a woman. There was one long writing-table and two small ones, two arm-chairs of deep blue, a deep-backed chair that had once belonged to Dickens at the writing-table. On the table itself perfect neatness, a writing-pad, an old shabby ink-bottle shaped like an owl (this had belonged to Henry Galleon), a round crystal bowl edged with gold that held now dark amber chrysanthemums, on his right hand a photograph of his wife, on his left a photograph of Galleon, a small bronze (a copy of the Donatello David), a silver paper-knife, a red stick of sealing-wax, a heavy blue paper-weight.

His library was evidently a working one. In the centre there was a square of bookshelf protected with glass; here were such rare editions and association copies as he had: first editions of the Essays of Elia in their green backs and pink paper labels, the copy of Vanity Fair that Thackeray gave to Dickens, some notebooks in manuscript kept by George Borrow while in Spain, a first edition of Ballantrae with 'To my friend Hans Frost from R. L. Stevenson' inscribed on the front page, Charlotte Brontë's Italian Grammar, some Kelmscott volumes, a number of Galleon's novels, with very affectionate greetings in that fine rich rolling hand, and three volumes of Proust's great and unending chronicle sent with the homages of the author. . . .

These were the principal treasures. For the rest, the working library divided meticulously into its proper sections. This labour from the devoted hands of Miss Caparis, the entirely excellent secretary.

Frost, holding the Manet in his hands, went over to the shelves. This for That! Tit for Tat! The Manet and the Roll of Friends in return for his own, how many volumes? He stood before his own collected 'Burshott' Edition. Here they were then.

Aware that some crisis--the nature of which he could only as yet dimly perceive, but its approach was heralded by a quiver in the spiritual air about him--was imminent, he stood, held, it seemed, by some dominating trance, and read their names.

It was as though he were saying to the Manet: 'Here! See at what you are valued. . . . Make yourself aware of the home to which you have come.'

He, who for many a day now had not glanced at their covers, read over their names. They had been published in Chronological Order. (Ah yes! the Grand Edition! How, five years ago, he had detested the bore of it with its neat little prefaces, its photogravure frontispieces of places associated with the books . . . and then, after all, no one had bought the damned thing. A White Elephant if ever White Elephant blew its own trumpet.)

And they were:

1889. The Crystal Bell. 1891. The Praddons. 1892. The Blissful Place. 1893. On the Road (Poems). 1895. The Duchess of Paradis. 1896. Queen Rosalind. 1898. The Miltonic Spirit (Essays). 1899. The Palace of Ice. 1900. Laura Merries. 1903. Green Parrots. 1904. Friendly Places (Travel). 1905. Goliath. 1906. The Philistines. 1907. In Israel. 1909. The Silver Tree. 1910. Troilus (Poems). 1912. Walter Savage Landor: Critical Study. 1913. Joy has Three Faces. 1914. The Chinese Miracle. 1916. The War and the Artist (Essays). 1919. Eumenides (Poems). 1922. The Scornful Sun. 1924. King Richard the Fourth.

He looked at them with dispassionate eyes. Such a number and, for the most part, having so little to do with him! How many of them retained any life for him still? The Praddons, with a certain youthful freshness, The Duchess of Paradis for its poetry, the Trilogy for some of the people in it, Joy has Three Faces for its irony, King Richard because it was the last . . . but for the most part how thin, how touchingly shadowy, how, as they looked at him, they seemed to beseech him not to forget them, because if he did not remember them who in heaven's name would?

No, what they did stand for was--not their artistic beauties, poor withered things--but certain stages in his immortal life.

He went back to his chair, settled down in it; Martha, sighing luxuriously, rested her head on his shoe. What was the matter with him? The Manet lay on his lap, the whites and blues and pearly greys looking up at him already with familiarity. What was the matter? He was disturbed. He looked restlessly about him.

Something was going to happen.

That deputation had unsettled him, not because it had emphasised that he was seventy but--but what? Was it the deputation or was it the Manet? Was it, perchance, the Manet that in its perfect and rich beauty pointed so ironic a contrast with his own deformed children? He moved restlessly, Martha's head slipped from his shoe, and she murmured resentfully.

He was unhappy. He wouldn't go down to tea and listen to their silly chatter. He must stay there and face the thing that was troubling him.

The Crystal Bell. His first published work, 1889.

Thirty-five years of age.

Not an infant even then. Fifteen years of good experience behind him. A clerk at the Foreign Office, where, as it had seemed, he had been settled for life--settled with a pearl pin in his tie, a cup of tea and a despatch case. He wrote by accident. He had no fervour, no inspiration, no heated blood and certainly, at that time, no genius.

He saw one sunsetty evening Nelson climb down from his column and ride away on the back of one of the lions. So he wrote about it. For his own satisfaction. Those were days at the end of the 'Eighties when the New Realism and Romantic Fancy were walking arm-in-arm together. Not that he had ever believed in those tea-caddy definitions. He detested them. But people liked the way he wrote and so he went on writing. That was the way of it. Once you began you couldn't stop, and, after the beginning, what happened to you was neither your fault nor your merit.

What happened to him was that he caught the eye of Stevenson and Henley, wrote for the National Observer and had the time of his life. He would never have such days again, of course--not those days of flaming, arrogant, abusive, triumphant, self-confident youth. Although he wasn't in reality young. Forty was less young in the 'Nineties than it is to-day perhaps.

With The Praddons his bell rang, and with The Duchess of Paradis he was lifted on to a little throne. Quite a small little throne, but raised so that you could look down upon other people. He didn't look down on other people--that had never been his habit--but for a while he was considered unique; no one else had ever written quite his thing; no one else could manage the Romantic Fantasy one minute and the Realistic the next. . . .

Oh well, it was all jargon, the kind of jargon that he detested. All he knew about it was that he had very pleasant rooms in St. James's Square and a cottage near Lewes, and that he wrote down what came to him.

Then with his Trilogy he was made--for ever and for ever and a day. Goliath in 1905, The Philistines in 1906, In Israel in 1907.

He knew that these books were good. He knew it then and he knew it now. They were his especial thing; the very sweet kernel of his very own nut. Every gift that he had was in them, his fantasy and his realism, his poetry and all his philosophy. Moreover, in them he created crowds of people, real live breathing people, a whole world of his own, embracing town and country, the Dome of St. Paul's, and the smallest squirrel skipping up a tree in the darkest little wood. The three books together were a long affair, and there wasn't a page too many.

By then he was more than fifty years of age, and he married Ruth, who was only twenty-five. Too great a difference, but he was madly in love with her--yes, as he had never been in all his life before.

He had always liked women, and twice he had been in love. But some fastidiousness had always been in the way, not of passion, but of complete surrender.

But to Ruth Curnow he surrendered--yes utterly--surrendered to her, mother and all.

She had been married before--very happily married--to Francis Curnow, who was vastly rich, adored, oh, adored her, got pneumonia, died and left her every penny.

And he, Hans Frost, adored her too--adored so that he did what he had sworn to the jealous gods he would never do, married a woman with more money than he had himself.

With a great deal more money, because, although he was on his little throne, and had a body of work behind him, including his famous Trilogy, he did not make very much money. In America they liked him as a reputation rather than a buying proposition--and in England, of course, nobody buys books.

The question was--why did Ruth marry him? This was a question that he had never very honestly faced. He loved her so desperately that he knew that it was wiser not to ask questions.

She did not love him desperately. She had no desperation in her, but she accepted him very readily, without a moment's hesitation. She was probably tired of being a widow.

She was extremely beautiful; she was like a fire at night, a sunrise at morning, a golden flower, a goddess in amber.

She had a great deal of the goddess about her, very tall, carrying herself superbly, her head high, looking down upon mankind. But she was very gracious and she was not stupid, and, if people behaved to her rightly, she liked them very much.

She was exceedingly good to Hans. There was nothing she wouldn't do for him, and she made it easy for him to accept her blessings, because it gave her so huge a pleasure to bestow them.

Oh! she was large, fine and generous! She was indeed!

If only she had not had her hideous old mother with her--but, then, nothing in this Jack-in-the-box world is perfect.

Mrs. Marriott was even then a dried-up old lady. She was, when Hans Frost first saw her, fifty-five years of age (she was only five years older than Hans) and fifty-five is no terrible age, but she wore lace caps and black silk dresses, carried in her hand a handkerchief with a thin black border, and read frequently in a large purple book of devotion.

Her one object in life, as she told everybody, was her daughter Ruth, the most marvellous woman in the world.

She was one of those old women who are for ever slapping the face of the present with the dead hand of the past. She was propriety itself, and was so frequently shocked at the persistent coarseness of Nature that how she had ever suffered the processes necessary for the production of children was an eternal wonder to her son-in-law.

It must be confessed that he disliked her from the first, but she went with Ruth and so must be accepted.

Must be accepted, yes, but with the years an increasing nightmare. That was really what she was, the old lady, a nightmare!

There had been a time, just before he was ill in 1913, when he had felt that he simply could not endure her any longer. His illness, in fact, had been a climax to many things.

In 1910, the year of his most difficult and obscure volume of poems, Troilus, he had suddenly, obeying an impulse that he did not understand, and that did not seem to be his, published at intervals in the columns of the august Daily World a number of poems about the man in the street. They had been rather colloquial, slangy, poems, and some of the higher critics had denied that they were poems at all, but they had immense force and energy and were as simple as Tennyson's 'Mr. Wilkinson.'

Some of them, 'Miss Battle,' 'The Man with the Coal,' 'Crossing-Sweeper,' had swept the country. Everyone learnt them by heart, lines from them crept into the language and, sure sign of universal acceptance, his name figured in contemporary musical comedy.

He delighted a wide public, because he provided something very rare now in England and always acceptable--literature that was acknowledged to be fine superior literature, and that yet could be understood by everybody. It was expected that now he would write a great English picaresque novel with all the energy, simplicity and creative genius of a Dickens, and the subtlety and beautiful prose of a Henry Galleon. But, of course, he did not.

In 1913 came his illness, and this, following so swiftly on his new popularity, made him a Figure.

Figures can be made in all sorts of ways in England--by imprisonment, by eccentricity of dress or food, by the refusal of honours, by bad manners, by the accident of foreign birth--and the surest way of all, have you the patience, is to wait until you are eighty, grow a white beard and live in the country fifty miles from anywhere so that people must make a Pilgrimage.

Hans had no wish, of course, to become a Figure--it was the last thing that he wanted, but it was thrust upon him, first by the sudden unexpected twist of his genius and, secondly, by his nearly dying in public.

He was too ill at the time to think of it and after his recovery too lazy, but had he considered the steps of his becoming a Figure he might have found them odd. The time was to come when he would consider them.

Meanwhile there followed the war, and, for the time, he vanished. His mother had been German, and German ancestry was not for some while popular; but here again Fate worked for him a queer twist in the pattern.

In his volume of Essays, The War and the Artist, published in 1916, some of the finest, noblest and sincerest utterances about the war in any language appeared. It was generally recognised that this was so. They were accepted by Patriot and Pacifist alike, because in them the true nobility of Hans' character, its depth, width, freedom from petty egotism, tenderness and unpriggish passion for humanity were openly displayed.

Then when at length the end of the war arrived, his volume of poems Eumenides was so commanding in style and lyrical splendour that he emerged at last as a Great Man--someone who would thenceforth be written about as though he were already dead.

For himself, his principal sensation was that during these years he had been incorrigibly lazy. It had not been a mental laziness nor, regarding the war, which he felt with the deepest poignancy, an emotional one. He had felt the war, he had felt and enjoyed his intellectual passion, but in his human personal relations he had been as lazy as a cat.

Men and women had been to him as trees walking. Even Ruth's horrible mother had been merely a kind of toad or baby alligator confined to the back garden. He had been even able to watch quite passively her habits as, at the Zoo, one observes a tortoise absorbing a lettuce.

So, from 1914 until now, this day, his seventieth birthday, he had lain in the arms of Ruth--lain there because he was too sleepy to move.

It had been a long while since he had lain there from instincts of physical passion. After his illness he had been aware that that was over for him, once and for all.

A great peace had descended upon him. The anxieties, triumphs and sudden ghastly disappointments of physical love were to be his no longer. He felt no shame and no regret. Work and friendship and love of his fellow-men remained, nay, could move the more nobly forward now unimpeded by the thickets and tangled undergrowth of that dusky wood.

Nor did Ruth offer objection. He could have realised now, had he investigated it, that physical passion had never been for her an impulse towards him. He did not examine it, but dismissed it, in company with a multitude of husbands, by deciding that she was sexually 'cold,' making his individual experience of her a general rule.

He knew that his sexual withdrawal from her gave her no ground of complaint, because the old woman, her mother, did not blame him for it.

He would have heard--oh yes, he would have heard--had he in this committed sin.

Meanwhile Ruth made him ever more comfortable. He was lapped round with luxury. The house grew ever more luxurious, more tranquil, more soft-footed. Bigges the butler, Miss Caparis his secretary, were ideal. They understood his needs before he uttered them. They were like his physical properties--his hands, his feet, his eyes. They were always there and they were never in the way.

Moreover, had he considered it, he would have seen that nothing but flattery and adoration came across his path. He did not consider it, because he did not want flattery and adoration. That is not to say that he did not care for an adroit compliment. Clever praise makes all men happy--a reassurance against the eternal fear of the hidden enemy--but he was at heart too simple, and by nature too generous, and intellectually too wise, to require incense.

He grew also intellectually lazy during these years. He ceased to have curiosity about his fellow human beings. Before this his interest in them had been a peculiar mixture of irony and tenderness, and in this same mixture he was himself involved save that in his view of himself his irony exceeded his tenderness.

Watching those around him he saw--and of course had long before this seen--that the only difference between one man and another was as to whether he were a poet or no. This difference had nothing to do with the actual creation of poetry nor with the delighted perception of it. Investigating his immediate household, for instance, it was plain that Bigges his butler was no poet and that Crouch his chauffeur was one. He was willing to admit that the decisions that he made were influenced by his personal liking and dislike. A poet to one is no poet to another, and it might be that to Mrs. Bigges, Bigges was Keats and Shelley pressed into one. But he knew what he meant. He had only to consider Crouch's straight and steady gaze and the sullen droop at the corner of Bigges' mouth to be aware that one was marching to glory and the other not.

He was immensely attracted to simple and good-hearted people, but he liked no one's company for very long. He became dissatisfied with himself rather than with them. It was incredible that human beings could be so stupid, so uninquisitive, so muddle-minded, but it was incredible, too, that they could offer so bold a front to undeserved misfortunes, could snatch time from their own problems to consider others. An ironic tenderness was the only emotion possible.

He made during these later years no close friends, and took but little trouble with old friendships. He had long ago perceived that among writers contemporary friendships were almost impossible to sustain. You could be paternal to a younger writer, would he only consent to be filial. You could, when young, yourself be filial. But the rivalries, jealousies, egotisms of the literary world (no fiercer, of course, than in any other artistic world) were disappointing, disturbing, sterile.

He had loved Henry Galleon with a deep and reverent love, but that on the whole had been the last of his reverence for his kind. Reverence was not the emotion that they aroused.

And so, for this reason as well as all the others, he snuggled into the lazy comforts that Ruth provided for him. He allowed her to make what she would of him so long as she did not worry him.

To himself he was no sort of a Figure at all. With the good that there had been in his work he seemed to have but little to do. The mistakes, clumsinesses, stupidities, they were his, but even there he could not worry himself very deeply, he had been born like all other human beings a fool, and a fool he would remain.

He was dimly conscious, as one may be in a dream, that Ruth was very happy in making a Legend of him. Well, if it amused her, why not? He did not object. He even liked some of the consequences of it. No one can be flattered for ever and ever and not, at last, react to the flattery. Not grossly and not to the grossest. But still the thing is there and it will be missed when it is there no longer. . . .

English people are not clever in their flattery of artists, because, thank God, they do not care very greatly for art. The only countries where art really flourishes are those in which the artists are left alone and work, in little isolated numbers, not against hostile surroundings but indifferent ones.

Hans knew that he had won his popularity by the elements that were least important in his work, but because the other elements were there also, he was someone who had a longer history. . . .

So he listened to the flattery at times, despised it and liked it. It did not change him, make him complacent or irritated by hostile criticism, but it bound him still more closely to Ruth, because she saw that he got just the kind of flattery that he could swallow.

He thought meanwhile increasingly in literary terms. Methods began greatly to interest him. He read the newest writers with a great deal of appreciation and sympathy. They could do things that he would never be able to do--and at the same time there were things that he had done for which they were too external and brittle and self-satisfied.

He wrote three articles on 'The New Novel' for one of the monthlies, and the house echoed: 'Wonderful to take such an interest in the young generation'; 'Marvellous modesty . . .'; 'This is real genius. . . .'

He knew that it was neither marvellous nor modesty nor genius, but only a literary vanity. He caught echoes beyond the house of 'Old Frost trying to catch up with the young people,' 'Why doesn't he lie quiet in his grave?'

He wasn't hurt by these distant voices--not at all--but he snuggled closer to Ruth.

When he went abroad he was a Figure. He wore a distinct sort of uniform, a black hat that was too short for a top-hat but too square for a bowler, with a large, curly brim. A buff waistcoat with gilt buttons, a broad dark blue coat, grey spats. A heavy black cane with a gold knob.

He was always immaculate. He hated untidiness of any kind. Spotless linen seemed to him next to the Grace of God.

He was a well-recognised figure in the centre of London. As he climbed slowly the broad steps of the 'Acropolis' Club the chauffeurs of the cars ranked in the square, the policemen on duty, the drivers of crawling taxis, all knew him. And often a casual passer-by wondered who that distinguished, swell old gentleman might be.

Yes, he was a Figure.