Note 32 — Chapter VII

Six years before, on the first night of The Blue Bird, I remember constructing from the name of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos a mental picture of some one very tall, very thin, very dark and saturnine, with a long amber cigarette-holder and a single eyeglass depending from a broad black ribbon. I had not then seen Max Beerbohm's caricature of him; and, at our first meeting, I murmured to myself, as hundreds have done before and since: "Of course! The old sheep in Alice Through the Looking-Glass." As hundreds have done before and since, I surrendered to his charm; and there is no friend to whom I owe more. For over three years we worked together, many hours a day for six days a week; our minds and moods found something always in common; in five years there cannot have been many days on which we did not meet or telephone or write. In the next five years may there be as few!

I am not alone in fashioning an imaginary figure to bear such a name. I am told that a distinguished black-and-white artist, meeting the name fortuitously, would walk pensively through the streets of London thereafter, searching the faces of the passers-by for one that would fit his ideal, Alexander-Teixeira-de-Mattos conception. And, when they met, I wonder if the artist was as much frightened as every newcomer to the department. On my second morning I looked up suddenly into a white impassive face; eyes unchanging in expression regarded me through the tortoise-shell spectacles which bestrid the impressive nose; the mouth was tightly-shut; neither word nor movement explained this paralysing figure which had glided to my table like some wandering sphinx. "I am not sure whether your minute intends to convey ..." he began at length and to my indescribable relief. Fear departed with that word, and we collaborated in redrawing the minute. Sometimes the Teixeira panic spread to distant committees which only knew his exquisite handwriting and his disabling knowledge of English; they hastened to do his bidding and to avert his wrath; no chairman likes to apologize twice for "the curiously pococurantist attitude of your committee", few care even to have the apology accepted with the words that consigned so many controversial files to oblivion: "Pray say no more. A.T."