Life's Adventure

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Philip Gibbs. Life's Adventure

Life's Adventure

Table of Contents

I

THE POWER OF THE WORD

II

A CAT MAY LOOK AT A KING

III

THE DANGERS OF BEING AN AUTHOR

IV

THE MUSIC OF MEN’S LIVES

V

HOUSES AND GARDENS

VI

THE LONG ARM OF COINCIDENCE

VII

THOSE AMERICANS

VIII

BENEVOLENT HOSPITALITY

IX

THE CURTAINS OF YESTERDAY

X

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

XI

BOTH YOUR HOUSES

XII

THE LITTLE PEOPLE

XIII

THE OLD PEOPLE

XIV

DREAM WORLD

XV

BEYOND ONE’S KEN

RETROSPECT

THE END

Отрывок из книги

Philip Gibbs

Published by Good Press, 2021

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It is one of the best of my pleasures to go to tea with him in a very old house called Old Tokefield, where Mrs. Swinnerton and her charming young daughter Olivia give one a kind welcome to a table with hot scones, currant buns, buttered toast, and a rich variety of attractive cakes. Here in the bosom of his family and in an atmosphere of peace and happiness, Frank Swinnerton has always another story to tell, another rich episode in life’s comedy; and his wife and daughter laugh in the right place as though they had heard it for the first time. Two cats, or three, come into the room haughtily or stealthily, and their master talks to them in their own language which he understands perfectly, having long been a student of cat psychology. Lately we have been pleased to pretend that he is one of the strong, silent men, because no less than two of his friends apologised for having talked too much. When I write to him I venture to hope that he will break his silence when next he comes. In the next letter he writes in the tiniest handwriting—each letter perfect, though microscopic—he hopes that I will pardon his miserable speechlessness. This seems to us both a very good joke.

Dear Frank Swinnerton has a genius for friendship. He knows, or has known, a great number of contemporary writers. There was a long comradeship between him and Arnold Bennett, whom he understood so well that once when somebody asked Bennett what he thought on a certain subject, Bennett, inhibited by a stammer, said, “You tell him, Swinnerton.” He can imitate Bennett’s way of speech and manners so perfectly that it is quite uncanny. It is Arnold Bennett himself, as I used to know him in the Reform Club, to which we both belonged, or as I used to meet him for a morning greeting in Cadogan Gardens, when both of us were living in that neighbourhood. But I didn’t know him well. He was an extraordinarily shy man. I actually saw him blush when I thanked him for an act of kindness to a young friend of mine. But Swinnerton established with him one of those ideal friendships which exist sometimes, but not often, between two men utterly unlike each other in character and temperament.

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