Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

								

the instigation of Watts himself. We stopped in front of this and, as
it was one of the “sights” of the district, I felt that I was expected
to say something wise or, at all events, something complimentary about
it. I could say neither.
“Which do people imagine it to be—useful or ornamental?” I asked.
“I wonder,” said he.
“For it is neither,” I ventured.
But his thoughts were otherwhere, for he began a long, technical
exposition on the art of making bricks and tiles. His talk became
art-and-crafty. I was carried back to my childhood days, my
kindergarten days. I heard the name of William Morris and I sighed
most profoundly.
Shaw won that walk by a neck. Having reached Piccard’s Cottage, he put
me in a kind of conservatory, gave me a blanket and a deck chair and
told me to go to sleep. But already I was asleep....
When I awoke it was quite dark, and, feeling rather miserable, I
groped my way back to the house. There I found Mr and Mrs Shaw in the
study, she frowning at her desk, he standing on the hearthrug and
looking at her most quizzically.
“Well, how much is it?” she asked. “Four times into two hundred. The
cheque must go by to-night’s post. I’ve done the sum three times,
and on each occasion I’ve got a different answer.”
“Is it two hundred pence or two hundred pounds?”
“Don’t be absurd, George. Even you know that you can’t get a furnished
house like this for two hundred pence a year.”
“Four times into two hundred—let me see—fifty. Yes, fifty. You can
safely write down fifty pounds.”
That little incident safely over, we turned to tea.
I induced Shaw to talk about his own work, and I quickly discovered
that, unlike most authors, he had no feeling of bitterness that he had
had to spend years in hard work before he won public recognition.
“A writer of originality must expect to have to wait. If a writer is
acclaimed immediately—I mean a writer on social and artistic
subjects—he may be pretty sure that he is saying things that have been
said before. He may be saying them better than anybody else;
nevertheless, they are the same things. My own success has been
gained, and is very largely maintained, by the force of my personality
and by the tradition about myself that has gradually grown up in the
mind of the public. For example, if I were to write an article and
give it to you to copy out and offer to editors in your own name, you
being the professional author, I doubt very much if a single editor
would look at it twice. A good deal, you see, is in a name.”
It was when Mrs Shaw, having sipped her tea, had left the room, that I
broached the subject of my book.
“Publishers are curious people,” I remarked meditatively.
He sat silent.
“My own publishers in particular. They are now fighting shy of a book
solely about you.”
I paused and glanced at him. But he was gazing at me with eyes of a