FROM THE LIFE
you have looked him up in Who's Who and the biographical dictionaries you know enough about him to be able to write the dates on his tombstone. But of the man himself it is safe to say that you know nothing.
Or suppose that you happened to know him in the flesh. Suppose that you had studied him in the days when he used to attend the meetings of the Executive Committee of the Authors' League at its weekly luncheon in the City Club. Well? You saw a ponderous bulk of male middle age, that looked like Thomas Edison somewhat, and somewhat like a Buddha, and a great deal like a human mushroom. You observed him listening, in massive silence, to arguments and motions, and you heard him grunt, "Aye." You noted the deftness with which he made a cigarette in his blunted, fat fingers, and you saw him light it gloomily, consume it in three or four puffs and an enormous final inhalation, wash the taste of it down with a gulp of whisky-and-water, and roll another cigarette with the melancholy air of an elephant that is being fed shelled peanuts one by one. Or you watched him signing his famous name to the circular letters of the League, with a silver-mounted fountain-pen as big as a bath-tap, and as fluent—bestowing his signature on the paper with a few large passes of his indifferent hand, like an archbishop bestowing a benediction, pontifically. And you could not help thinking of the stupendous
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