arranging with feminine luxuriousness the voluptuous folds of his blue silk scarf, “the man really had something one time. He really did. Something strange and haunting—the genius of the Celt.” Swinging his cane slowly, acutely and painfully conscious that he was being watched, with the agonizing stiffness that was at the bottom of his character, he strolled off across the Yard, stark and lovely with the harsh white snow and wintry branches of bleak winter.
“You know—you know—you know—that’s very interesting,” said Dodd, intent upon his words. “I’d—I’d—I’d never thought of it in just that way.”
“Barrie,” drawled Wood, the maker of epigrams, “is a stick of taffy, floating upon a sea of molasses.”
There was laughter.
He was for ever making these epigrams; his face had a somewhat saturnine cast, his lips twisted ironically, his eyes shot splintered promises of satiric wisdom. He looked like a very caustically humorous person; but unhappily he had no humour. But they thought he had. No one with a face like that could be less than keen.
So he had something to say for every occasion. He had discovered that the manner counted for wit. If the talk was of Shaw’s deficiencies as a dramatist, he might say:
“But, after all, if one is going in for all that sort of thing, why not have lantern slides and a course of lectures?”
Thus he was known, not merely as a subtle-souled and elusive psychologist but also as a biting wit.
“Galsworthy wrote something that looked like a play once,” someone remarked. “There were parts of Justice that weren’t bad.”
“Yes. Yes,” said Dodd, peering intently at his language. “Justice—there were some interesting things in that. It’s—it’s—it’s rather a pity about him, isn’t it?” And as he said these words he frowned earnestly and intently. There was genuine pity in his voice, for the man’s spirit had great charity and sweetness in it.
As they dispersed, someone remarked that Shaw might have made a dramatist if he had ever known anything about writing a play.
“But he dates so—how he dates!” Scoville remarked.
“Those earlier plays—”
“Yes, I agree”—thus Wood again. “Almost Mid-Victorian. Shaw:—a prophet with his face turned backwards.” Then they went away in small groups.
