Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/39

WILSON FOLLETT then indignant, then furious, and thence, passing round the circle of exhausted emotions, came back by the way of despair to a disgusted silence. Not so Bistri: silence was the last thing to fall within the orbit of his intentions, so long as the Master and Maker of dogs vouchsafed him breath and being. Gradually the silence of genius, there across the room, acquired a subtly grim texture. When next the voice of genius spoke, it was tensely, with suppressed ferocity, as through clenched teeth. What it said was this: "I'll bet Scribner has got no such damned dog."

The rest, after Gargantuan laughter, was silence.... Ah, but was it, quite? Or did the speaker of these words, also deeming them too precious to die, retail them at late breakfast to the mistress of the borzoi, even as their sole hearer presently reported them at earlier breakfast to the borzoi's master? It would be interesting to know—and not very surprising either way.

III

So far the record of a personal and temperamental susceptibility, of some incidental interest, perhaps, to the curious. What remains to speak of is the deeper susceptibility of which Mr. Hergesheimer's books are the record, and which runs through all his public work, a determining law and a binding continuum; that enormous and delicate susceptibility to sights, sounds, forms, colours, movements, aspects, which is at once his purpose and his effect, his unconscious excuse for being and his conscious claim to self-justification. He might say, in the words of a document already referred to, and important in the history of fictional art: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement,