T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 617

To Geoffrey Leynes, 11 Arkwright Road, Hampstead, N.W.3. 13 Birmingham St Southampton. 6.viii.34 Dear G.K. Did your nervous system prickle with discomfort a few weeks ago, when S.S. and I at Heytesbury dissected your nature? Not that you came badly out of it - what mostly worried S.S. was your being, despite it all, a surgeon. I had very Machavon in the back of my mind, but kept silence on it. A very luminous work, for all its smellingses, must eventually be grown or snuffed out -- but that is the common fate of everything human. Science is not a treasure but an organism, engulfing itself, halting, dying, but germinating quickly into a new growth. That seems to me noteworthy today, is the shortness of our generations, the rapid tempo of life, a score to accelerate in geometrical progressions. One must not write like that to a scientist. I intended to tell you of my visit upon Heytesbury. All visitors there intrude, as yet, I think. We find she are like children alone in the world. The huge house, which they are furnishing for a song in memory of the mansion style; the gardens, so lavishly kept up, the quiet sun-...pren...ted park; the gay laughing strangers running about it, making pretence to own it. Heytesbury was rather like one of the great villas of Roman Britain, after the legions had gone. S.S. looked abnormally happy. Much of his hesitant diction has been forgotten. He speaks easily, and in full of private jests. He looks as well, too. I was told that he captains the local cricket team, and the village postman (having exhausted the wet books) is going on to his poetry. Whether it will last I cannot say. The barometer cannot always stand so high. It will be time for obituaries to come along, then. We spread out on the floor all the proofs of your engravings, with the lovely title-page, and gloated over them. It will be a gracious and satisfable book. The reduction of the mandibles and flourishes at the ends of poems, or to fill up short lines, has been tactfully done. The pages ...