Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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I need scarcely say that when I went to London I did not seek out Houghton, who had settled down in the Metropolis some months before me. But we met in the Strand, he wearing a fur-lined overcoat and looking a trifle like H.B. Irving, and I carrying a load of review books under my arm. We looked at each other; we hesitated; we stopped. Stanley was a trifle languid and, after a few inconsequent remarks, he began telling me the history of his fur overcoat. He had, he said, bought it for five pounds or seven pounds, or some such ridiculously low price, and he had bought it second-hand.

ssss1And (Fate wills these things) whenever I hear the name Stanley Houghton I think of that rather tall, rather aristocratic, figure in the Strand wearing its second-hand fur-lined overcoat and talking, with embarrassment, about nothing in particular, standing first on one foot and then on the other.

It is, of course, impossible to predict with certainty what further successes Houghton would have achieved had he lived, but there can be little doubt that his sharp and lively talents would have produced plays even more noticeable than Hindle Wakes. A little more experience of life would probably have shown him the futility and the destructive effects of his intellectual snobbery. He was raw and crude, and success did not mellow or enlarge him.