Up till now it had never occurred to Rickman that his connection withMetropoliscould directly damage him, still less that Jewdwine could personally inflict a blow. But the injury now done to him was monstrous and intolerable; Jewdwine had hurt him in a peculiarly delicate and shrinking place. Because his nature was not originally magnificent in virtue of another sort, it was before all things necessary that he should perserve his intellectual chastity. That quality went deeper than the intellect; it was one with a sense of honour so fine that a touch, impalpable to ordinary men, was felt by it as a laceration and a stain. He walked up to Hampstead that Sunday evening, taking the hill at a round swinging pace. Not all the ardour and enthusiasm of his youth had ever carried him there with such an impetus as did his burning indignation against Jewdwine. And as he went the spirit of youth, the spirit of young Paterson, went beside him and breathed upon the flame.
And yet he was the same man who only an hour ago had been defending Jewdwine's honour at the expense of his own; without a thought that in so defending it he was doing anything in the least quixotic or remarkable. He had done nothing. He had simply refrained at a critical moment from giving him away. Maddox was Jewdwine's enemy; and to have given Jewdwine away at that moment would have meant delivering him over to Maddox to destroy.
No; when he thought of it he could hardly say he had defended his friend's honour at the expense of his own; for Jewdwine's honour was Lucia's, and Lucia's was not Jewdwine's but his, indistinguishably, inseparably his.
But though he was not going to give Jewdwine up to Maddox, he was going to give him up. It might come to the same thing. He could imagine that, to anybody who chose to put two and two together, an open rupture would give him away as completely as if he had accused him in so many words. That, of course he could not help. There was a point beyond which his honour refused to identify itself with Jewdwine's. He had never felt a moment's hesitation upon that point. For in his heart he condemned his friend far more severely than Maddox could have condemned anybody. He had a greater capacity for disgust than Maddox. He would draw up, writhing at trifles over which Maddox would merely shrug his shoulders and pass on. In this instance Maddox, whose Celtic soul grew wanton at the prospect of a fight, would have fallen upon Jewdwine with an infernal joy, but he would have been the first to deprecate Rickman's decision as absurd. As for Rankin of Stables, instead of flying into a passion they would, in similar circumstances, have sat still and smiled.
If it had not been for young Paterson, Rickman would have smiled too, even if he had been unable to sit still; for his vision of Fulcher pocketing the carefully selected praise intended for Paterson was purely and supremely comic; so delightful in fact, that he could have embraced Jewdwine for providing it. But Paterson, who had looked to him as to the giver of life or death, Paterson on his death-bed taking Fulcher's paragraph to himself and wondering whether it were indeed Rickman who had done this thing, the thought of Paterson was too painful to be borne. Honour or no honour, it would be impossible for him to work for Jewdwine after that.
He had got to make that clear to Jewdwine; and anything more unpleasant than the coming interview he could not well conceive.
Unpleasantness you would have said, was far from Jewdwine's mind that Sunday evening. He himself suggested nothing of the sort. He was in his study, sitting in an armchair with a shawl over his knees, smoking a cigarette and looking more pathetically refined than ever after his influenza, when Rickman burst in upon his peace. He was so frankly glad to see him that his greeting alone was enough to disarm prejudice. It seemed likely that he would carry off the honours of the discussion by remaining severely polite while Rickman grew more and more perturbed and heated. Rickman, however, gained at the outset by making straight for his point. As Jewdwine gave him no opening he had to make one and make it as early as possible, before the great man's amenities had time to lure him from the track.
"I wish," said he abruptly, "you'd tell me what was wrong with those reviews of mine, that you found it necessary to alter them?"
"The reviews? Oh, the reviews were all right—excellent material—they only wanted a little editing."
"Do you mind telling me what you mean by editing?"
"Thatis the last point an editor is competent to explain."
"All the same I'd like to hear what you've got to say. I think you'll admit that you owe me some explanation."
"My dear fellow—sit down, won't you?—I admit nothing of the sort."
Jewdwine no longer stood on his dignity, he lay back on it, lounged on it, stretched all his graceful length upon it, infinitely at ease. Time had mellowed his manners and made them incomparably gentle and humane.
"You seem to think I took a liberty with your articles. I didn't. I merely exercised an ancient editorial right. I couldn't possibly have let them be printed as they stood. Conceive my feelings if I'd had to sit next to Mr. Fulcher at dinner that evening. It might easily have happened. It's all very well for you, Rickman; you're young and irresponsible, and you haven't got to sit next to Mr. Fulcher at dinner; but you'll own that it would have been rather an awkward situation for me?"
"I can forgive you Fulcher, but I can't forgive you Paterson."
"And I could have forgiven you Paterson, but I couldn't forgive you Fulcher. Do you see?"
He allowed a few moments for reflection, and continued.
"Of course, I understand your feelings. In fact I sympathize profoundly. As a rule I never dream of touching anything with your signature; I've far too great a reverence for style."
"Style be d——d. For all I care you may cut up my style till you can't tell it from Fulcher's. I object to your transposing my meaning to suit your own. Honestly, Jewdwine, I'd rather write like Fulcher than write as you've made me appear to have written."
"My dear Rickman, that's where you make the mistake. You don't appear at all." He smiled with urbane tolerance of the error. "The editor, as you know, is solely responsible for unsigned reviews."
So far Jewdwine had come off well. He had always a tremendous advantage in his hereditary manners; however right you had been to start with, his imperturbable refinement put you grossly in the wrong. And at this point Rickman gave himself away.
"What's the good of that?" said he, "if young Paterson believes I wrote them?"
"Young Paterson isn't entitled to any belief in the matter."
"But—he knew."
There was a shade of genuine annoyance on Jewdwine's face.
"Oh of course, if you've told him that you were the author. That's rather awkward for you, but it's hardly my fault. I'm sorry, Rickman, but you reallyarea little indiscreet."
"I wish I could explain your behaviour in the same way."
"Come, since you're so keen on explanations, how do you propose to explain your own? I gave you certain instructions, and what right had you to go beyond them, not to say against them?"
"What earthly right had you to make me say the exact opposite of what I did say? But I didn't go against your instructions. Here they are."
He produced them. "You'll see that you gave me a perfectly free hand as to space."
Jewdwine looked keenly at him. "You knew perfectly well what I meant. And you took advantage of—of a trifling ambiguity in my phrasing, to do—as you would say—the exact opposite. That was hardly what I expected of you."
As he spoke Jewdwine drew his shawl up about his waist, thus delicately drawing attention to his enfeebled state. The gesture seemed to convict Rickman of taking advantage not only of his phrase but of his influenza, behaviour superlatively base.
"I can give you a perfectly clear statement of the case. You carefully suppressedmyfriend and you boomed your own for all you were worth. Naturally, I reversed your judgment. Of course, if you had told me you wanted to do a little log-rolling on your own account, I should have been only too delighted—but I always understood that you disapproved of the practice."
"So I do. Paterson isn't a friend of mine."
"He's your friend's friend then. I think Mr. Maddox might have been left to look after his own man."
Rickman rose hastily, as if he were no longer able to sit still and bear it.
"Jewdwine," he said, and his voice had the vibration which the master had once found so irresistible. "Have you read young Paterson's poems?"
"Yes. I've read them."
"And what is your honest—your private opinion of them?"
"I'm not a fool, Rickman. My private opinion of them is the same as yours."
"What an admission!"
"But," said Jewdwine suavely, "that's not the sort of opinion my public—the public that pays forMetropolis—pays to have."
"You mean it's the sort of opinion I'm paid to give."
"Well, broadly speaking—of course there are exceptions, and Paterson in other circumstances might have been one of them—that's very much what I do mean."
"Then—I'm awfully sorry, Jewdwine—but if that's so I can't go on working forMetropolis. I must give it up. In fact, that's really what I came to say."
Jewdwine too had risen with an air of relief, being anxious to end an interview which was becoming more uncomfortable than he cared for. He had stood, gazing under drooping eyelids at his disciple's feet. Nobody would have been more surprised than Jewdwine if you had suggested to him that he could have any feeling about looking anybody in the face. But at that last incredible, impossible speech of his he raised his eyes and fixed them on Rickman's for a moment.
In that moment many things were revealed to him.
He turned and stood with his back to Rickman, staring through the open window. All that he saw there, the quiet walled garden, the rows of elms on the terrace beside it, the dim green of the Heath, and the steep unscaleable grey blue barrier of the sky, had taken on an unfamiliar aspect, as it were a tragic simplicity and vastness. For these things, once so restfully indifferent, had in a moment become the background of his spiritual agony, a scene where his soul appeared to him, standing out suddenly shelterless, naked and alone. No—if ithadonly been alone; but that was the peculiar horror of it. He could have borne it but for the presence of the other man who had called forth the appalling vision, and remained a spectator of it.
There was at least this much comfort for him in his pangs—he knew that a man of coarser fibre would neither have felt nor understood them. But it was impossible for Jewdwine to do an ignoble thing and not to suffer; it was the innermost delicacy of his soul that made it writhe under the destiny he had thrust upon it.
And in the same instant he recognized and acknowledged the greatness of the man with whom he had to do; acknowledged, not grudgingly, not in spite of himself, but because of himself, because of that finer soul within his soul which spoke the truth in secret, being born to recognize great things and admire them. He wondered now how he could ever have mistaken Rickman. He perceived the origin and significance of his attitude of disparagement, of doubt. It dated from a certain hot July afternoon eight years ago when he lay under a beech-tree in the garden of Court House and Lucia had insisted on talking about the poet, displaying an enthusiasm too ardent to be borne. He had meant well by Rickman, but Lucia's ardour had somehow put him off. Maddox's had had the same effect, though for a totally different reason, and so it had gone on. He had said to himself that if other people were going to take Rickman that way he could no longer feel the same peculiar interest.
He turned back again.
"Do you really mean it?" said he.
"I'm afraid I do."
"You mean that you intend to give up reviewing forMetropolis?"
"I mean that after this I can't have anything more to do with it."
He means, thought Jewdwine, that he won't have anything more to do with me.
And Rickman saw that he was understood. He wondered how Jewdwine would take it.
He took it nobly. "Well," he said, "I'm sorry. But if you must go, you must. To tell the truth, my dear fellow, at this rate, you know, I couldn't afford to keep you. I wish I could. You are not the only thing I can't afford." He said it with a certain emotion not very successfully concealed beneath his smile. Rickman was about to go; but he detained him.
"Wait one minute. Do you mind telling me whether you've any regular sources of income besidesMetropolis?"
"Well, not at the moment."
"And supposing—none arise?"
"I must risk it."
"You seem to have a positive mania for taking risks." Yes, that was Rickman all over, he found a brilliant joy in the excitement; he was in love with danger.
"Oh well, sometimes, you know, you'vegotto take them."
Happy Rickman! The things that were so difficult and complicated to Jewdwine were so simple, so incontestable to him. "Some people, Rickman, would say you were a fool." He sighed, and the sigh was a tribute his envy paid to Rickman's foolishness. "I won't offer an opinion; the event will prove."
"It won't prove anything. Events never do. They merely happen."
"Well, if they happen wrong, and I can help you, you've only got to come to me."
Never in all his life had Jewdwine so nearly achieved the grace of humility as in this offer of his help. He would have given anything if Rickman could have accepted it, but refusal was a foregone conclusion. And yet he offered it.
"Thanks—thanks awfully." It was Rickman who appeared nervous and ashamed. His mouth twitched; he held out his hand abruptly; he was desperately anxious to say good-night and get it over. It seemed to him that he had been six years taking leave of Jewdwine; each year had seen the departure of some quality he had known him by. He wanted to have done with it now for ever.
But Jewdwine would not see his hand. He turned away; paced the floor; swung back on a hesitating heel and approached him, smiling.
"You're not going to disappear altogether, are you? You'll turn up again, and let me know how you're getting on?"
To Rickman there was something tragic and retrospective in Jewdwine's smile. It had no joy in it, but an appeal, rather, to the memory of what he had been. He found it irresistible.
"Thanks. I shall get on all right; but I'll turn up again sometime."
Jewdwine's smile parted with its pathos, its appeal. It conveyed a promise, an assurance that whatever else had perished in him his friendship was not dead.
For there were ways, apart from the ways of journalism, in which Jewdwine could be noble still. And still, as he watched Rickman's departing back, the back that he seemed doomed to know so well, he said to himself—
"He's magnificent, but I can't afford him."
In all this his history had only repeated itself. When six years ago he had turned his back on Rickman's he had made it inevitable that he should turn his back on Jewdwine now. On each occasion his behaviour had provoked the same melancholy admission, from Jewdwine—"He is magnificent, but I can't afford him"; from Isaac Rickman—"I can't afford to pay your price, my boy." The incredible thing was that Jewdwine should have been brought to say it. Jewdwine was changed; but Rickman was the same Rickman who had swung the shop door behind him, unmoved by the separation from his salary.
But after all he could only keep half of that rash vow he had made to himself on the way to Hampstead. He must give up the Editor ofMetropolis; but he could not give up Horace Jewdwine. It was not the first time he had been compelled to admit the distinction which Maddox for decency's sake had insisted on. When it came to the point, as now, he found himself insisting on it with even greater emphasis than Maddox. He knew that in his soul Jewdwine still loved and worshipped what was admirable, that in his soul he would have given anything to recall his injustice to young Paterson. But young Paterson was too great to have need either of Jewdwine or of him. Young Paterson had his genius to console him. His profounder pity was for the man who had inflicted such awful injuries on himself; the great man who had made himself mean; the spiritual person who had yielded to a material tyranny; the incorruptible person who had sold his soul, who only realized the value of his soul now that he had sold it.
And yet he knew that there could be nothing more sundering than such meanness, such corruptibility as Jewdwine's. Their friendship could never be the same. There was a certain relief in that. There could never be any hypocrisy, any illusion in their relations now. And nobody knew that better than Jewdwine. Well, the very fact that Jewdwine had still desired and chosen that sad-hearted, clear-eyed communion argued a certain greatness in him.
Therefore he resolved to spare him. It would cost him the friendship of better men than he; but that could not be helped. They must continue to think that he had sold or at any rate lent himself at interest to Jewdwine. Honour debarred him from all explanation and defence, an honour so private and personal that it must remain unsuspected by the world. In the beginning he had made himself almost unpleasantly conspicuous by the purity of his literary morals; his innocence had been a hair-lifting spectacle even to honest journalists. And now the fame he would have among them was the fame of a literary prostitute, without a prostitute's wages.
On the contrary he would have to pay heavily for the spiritual luxury of that break with the editor ofMetropolis. When he reached his comfortable room on the third floor in Torrington Square, he sat down by his writing-table, not to write but to think. It was war-time, fatal to letters. Such terrors arose before him as must arise before a young man severed by his own rash act from the sources of his income. What a moment he had chosen for the deed, too! When money was of all things the thing he most passionately desired; when to his fancy the sum of a hundred and seventy-five pounds was the form that most nearly, most divinely presented the adored perfection; when, too, that enchanting figure was almost in his grasp. A few brief spasms of economy, and ten months ofMetropoliswould have seen him through.
And yet there was no bitterness in the dismay with which he contemplated his present forlorn and impecunious state. It was inevitable that he should sever himself from the sources of his income when they were found to be impure. Much more inevitable than that he should have cut off that untainted supply which six months ago would have flowed to him through Maddox. Common prudence had not restrained him from quarrelling with Maddox over a point of honour that was shadowy compared with this. It was hardly likely that it should have restrained him now. There were few things that he would not do for Lucia Harden, but not even for her sake could he have done otherwise than he had done. It was the least that honour could require of him, the very least.
His attitude to honour had in a manner changed. Eight years ago it had seemed to him the fantastic child of a preference for common honesty, coupled with a preposterous passion for Lucia Harden. He had indulged it as a man indulges the creature of fantasy and caprice, and had felt that he was thrusting a personal infatuation into a moral region where such extravagances are unknown. It belonged rather to the realm of imagination, being essentially a poet's honour, a winged and lyric creature, a creature altogether too radiant and delicate to do battle with the gross material world, a thing as mysterious and indomitable as his genius; a very embarrassing companion for a young journalist in his first start in life. And now he had grown so used to it that it seemed to him no longer mysterious and fantastic; obedience to it was as simple as the following of a natural impulse, a thing in no way conspicuous and superb. It was the men who knew nothing of such leadership who seemed to him separated from the order of the world. But to the friends who watched him Rickman's honour had been always an amazing spectacle. Like another genius it had taken possession of him and led him through what Jewdwine had called the slough of journalism, so that he went with fine fastidious feet, choosing the clean places in that difficult way. Like another genius it had lured him, laughing and reckless, along paths perilous and impossible to other men. How glad he had been to follow that bright-eyed impetuous leader.
And this was where it had led him to, the radiant and delicate comrade of his youth. As he sat propping his chin up with his hands the face that confronted destiny had grown haggard in an hour.
He pulled himself together, and deliberately reviewed the situation. He had at that moment three and eightpence in his pocket, and lying about somewhere in the table-drawer there was part of last week's salary and a cheque for nine pounds, the price of a recent article. He could count on five pounds at Michaelmas, the quarterly rent of the furniture in the little house at Ealing. Added to these certain sums there was that unknown incalculable amount that he might yet receive for unsolicited contributions. He had made seventy-five pounds in this way last year. The casual earnings of ninety-nine were no security for nineteen hundred; still, invincible hopefulness fixed the probabilities at that figure.
But it was now January, and Dicky Pilkington's bill would be due in November. By successive triumphs of ingenious economy he had reduced that once appalling seven hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy-five. He couldn't actually count on more than twenty-six pounds three and eightpence with which to meet the liability. And he had also to live for ten months before he met it. Even invincible Hope was nervous facing those formidable figures. It did indeed suggest the presence of a shadowy army in the rear, whole columns of figures marching invincibly to his aid. They were the sums that might, that ought to be obtained by a dramatic poet in the hour of his success. But Rickman had not been born over a bookseller's shop for nothing; and an austere hereditary voice reminded him that he couldn't really count on a penny from his tragedy. He couldn't even afford to write it. The thing was, economically speaking, a crime. It would of course be finished, as it had been begun, in defiance of economy, as of all other human pieties and laws, but it would be unreasonable to expect that any financial blessing could rest on it.
He had only got ten months to raise the money in. It would probably take him that time to find regular work, if he found it. There was not an editor in London to whom the initials S.K.R. conveyed the unique significance they did to Jewdwine, to Maddox and to Rankin. He now thought with regret of the introductions he had refused in the insolence of his youth. To Hanson for instance. Hanson was a good sort, and he might have come in very handy now. A few other names passed before him, men whom it would be useless for him to approach. There was old Mackinnon, though, who was a good sort, too. He had long ago forgotten that ancient jest which compared his head with the dome of the Museum. He had been the most frequent entertainer of adventitious prose. Mackinnon might be good for something. He had half a mind to look him up. The thought of Mackinnon made him feel almost cheerful again.
Before he went to bed he put ten pounds into a tobacco-jar on an inaccessible shelf, keeping one pound three and eightpence for the expenses of the coming week. The next morning he looked Mackinnon up.
Now Mackinnon's head was so far unlike the dome of the Museum that it was by no means impervious to light; and where Mackinnon's interests were concerned it was positively limpid in its transparency. So that Mackinnon was not slow to perceive the advantages of an alliance with impecunious brilliance. The brilliance he was already familiar with, the impecuniosity he inferred from the more than usual offhandedness of Rickman's manner. The war had hit Mackinnon also; the affairs of theLiterary Observerwere not so flourishing as Mackinnon could have wished, and he was meditating some reductions in his staff. He reflected that young men in Rickman's mood and Rickman's circumstances were sometimes willing to do the work of two journalists for a lower salary than he had been paying to one. And when he further learnt that Rickman had leftMetropolis, he felt that besides these solid advantages a subtler satisfaction would be his. Jewdwine, corruptible or incorruptible, had not endeared himself to other editors, and even the sober Mackinnon was unable to resist the temptation of annexing the great man's great man. But the dome-like head, impenetrable in this, betrayed none of the thoughts that were going on inside it, and in the bargaining that followed it was concealed from Rickman that his connection withMetropolishad in any way increased his market value. He made the best terms he could; and the end of the interview found him retained on Mackinnon's staff as leader, writer and dramatic critic at a salary of two pounds ten a week. Mackinnon had offered two pounds, Rickman had held out for three, and they split the difference. As the poet left the room Mackinnon turned to his desk with a smile of satisfaction that seemed to illuminate the dome. He had effected a considerable saving by that little transaction.
And for the poet it did not prove so bad a bargain after all. He had now a more ample leisure; and for the first time in his journalistic career he knew what it was to be left mercifully, beneficently alone. He had cut himself off from all his friends; and though at times his heart suffered, his genius profited by the isolation. It was not until he had escaped from Jewdwine that he realized what that special deliverance meant for him. He could not well have encountered a more subtle and dangerous influence than that of the author of theProlegomena to Æsthetics. Jewdwine had been hostile to his genius from the beginning, though he had cared for it, too, in his imperious way. He would have tamed the young, ungovernably ardent thing and wedded it to his own beautiful and passionless idea; an achievement which would have reflected some glory on Jewdwine as the matchmaker. But he had left off caring when he found that he had less to gain from Rickman's genius than from his talent, and had turned his attention to the protection and encouragement of the more profitable power. As that talent ran riot in the columns ofMetropolisRickman himself was unaware how relentlessly it drew on the vitality that sustained his genius. It was Jewdwine's excuse that the vitality seemed inexhaustible.
Jewdwine, as he had once said, dreaded the divine fire. He would ultimately have subdued the flame by a persistent demand for brilliance of another kind. Even Maddox (who adored his Rickman) had not seen that his Rickman, his young divinity, must change and grow. He admired his immortal adolescence; he would have him young and lyrical for ever. He had discovered everything in him but the dramatic poet he was yet to be. Thus, through the very fervour of his superstition, Maddox had proved hostile, too. But in Mackinnon Rickman found no malign disturbing influence, no influence of any kind at all. No thought of capturing his genius or exploiting his talent had ever entered into the dome-like head. Mackinnon, his mortal nature appeased by his victory over Jewdwine and further gratified by the consciousness of having secured a good man cheap, made no exorbitant claims on his contributor. Let Rickman write what he would, Mackinnon knew he had got his money's worth.
Rickman squared himself nobly for the next round with fortune. And Dicky, in his attitude of enthusiastic but not uninterested spectator, cheered him on, secretly exultant. Dicky was now serenely sure of his odds. It was war-time; and Rickman could not hold out long after such an injury to his income.
But Rickman, unconquered, made matters even by reducing his expenditure. It was winter, and the severity of the weather would have ruined him in coal alone had he not abandoned the superstition of a fire. With an oil-stove there was always some slight danger of asphyxia, but Rickman loved the piquancy of danger. By many such ingenious substitutions he effected so prodigious a saving that three-fifths or more of his salary went into the tobacco-jar and thence into Dicky Pilkington's pocket. He rejoiced to see it go, so completely had he subdued the lust of spending, so ardently embraced the life of poverty; if it were poverty to live on a pound a week. Was it not rather wanton, iniquitous extravagance to have allowed himself three times that amount? But for that his position at this moment would have been such that three months on theLiterary Observerwould have cleared him. As he stood, the remainder of his debt loomed monstrous under the shadow of next November.
And it was this moment (when he should have been turning his talent into ready-money by unremitting journalism), that he chose for finishing his tragedy. If he could be said to have chosen it; for it was rather the Tragic Muse that had claimed him for her own. She knew her hour, the first young hour of his deliverance, when he had ceased from hungering and thirsting after life, and from the violence and stress of living, and was no more tormented by scruple and by passion; when the flaming orgy of his individuality no longer confused the pageant of the world. He had been judging by himself when he propounded the startling theory that lyric poets must grow into dramatic poets if they grow at all. It was now, when his youth no longer sang aloud in him, that he heard the living voices of the men and women whom he made. Their flesh and blood no longer struggled violently for birth, no longer tortured the delicate tissue of the dream. His dreams themselves were brought forth incarnate, he being no longer at variance with himself as in the days of neo-classic drama.
And so now, when he contemplated his poverty, he saw in it the dream-crowned head and austere countenance of an archangel destiny. In the absence of all visible and material comfort the invisible powers assumed their magnificent dominion. He gave his evenings to Mackinnon and his mornings, his fresh divine mornings, to the Tragic Muse, thus setting a blessed purifying interval of sleep between his talent and his genius. But through it all, while he slept and while he worked, and while he scribbled with a tenth part of his brain, mechanically filling in his columns of theLiterary Observer, he felt that his genius, conscious of its hour, possessed him utterly. Not even for Lucia's sake could he resist the god who was so tyrannous and strong. In his heart he called on her to forgive him for writing unsaleable tragedies when he ought to have been making money for her. His heart kept on accusing him. "You would write tragedies if she were starving," it said. And the god, indignant at the interruption, answered it, "You wouldn't, you fool, you know you wouldn't. And she isn't starving. It's you who'll starve, if anybody does; so fire away." And he fired away; for hope, still invincible, told him that he could afford to do it, that he had in a drawer fifty pounds' worth of unpublished articles, works of the baser power, and that, war or no war, he could surely sell them. He could sell his furniture also; and if the worst came to the worst, he could sell his books (his own books, not Lucia's). Meanwhile he must get on with his tragedy. He could easily finish it in six weeks, and expiate the crime by months of journalism.
He did finish it in six weeks; and when the Spring came he began another; for the hand of the god was heavy upon him. This he knew was madness, though a madness divine and irresistible. In view of its continuance he called upon Mackinnon and inquired whether at any time, if the occasion should arise, he could count upon an advance of salary. Mackinnon, solid, impenetrable, but benignant, replied that very possibly it might be so. This Rickman interpreted as a distinct encouragement to dally with the Tragic Muse. It was followed by a request from Mackinnon that Rickman on his part should oblige him with a few columns in advance. This he did. He was now, though he was blissfully unaware of it, the last man on the paper. In six months from the time of his joining its staff theLiterary Observerceased from observing, and Mackinnon retired suddenly into private life.
Dicky, who had watched with joy the decline of theLiterary Observer, chuckled openly at its fall. He was sorry for old Razors, though. It was hard luck on him. Old Razors, in Dicky's opinion, was about done for now.
It might have seemed so to Rickman but that the experience had sobered him. He rose from the embraces of the Tragic Muse. Yet dizzy with the august rapture, he resisted and defied the god. He thrust his tragedy from him into the hindmost obscurity of his table-drawer. Then he betook himself, in a mood more imperative than solicitous, to Hanson. Hanson who had labelled him Decadent, and lumped him with Letheby. It was no matter now. Whatever Hanson thought of his genius, there could be but one opinion of his talent.
Hanson was genial and complimentary. He, like Mackinnon, knew his business too well to let Savage Keith Rickman slip through his fingers. Like Mackinnon he was pleased with the idea of securing a deserter from the insufferable Jewdwine. But theCourierwas full up with war news and entirely contented with its staff. Hanson was only good for occasional contributions.
Rickman again overhauled his complicated accounts. By what seemed to him a series of miracles he had saved seventy-five pounds somehow during those six months with Mackinnon; but how he was going to raise a hundred in four months he did not know. That was what he meant to try for, though. It was July; and he loved more than ever the green peace of Torrington Square, and the room associated with the first austere delights of poverty and the presence of the Tragic Muse. But he could forego even peace for four months. After much search in the secret places of Bloomsbury, he found an empty attic in Howland Street. The house was clean, decent, and quiet for a wonder. Thither he removed himself and his belongings. He had parted with all but the absolutely essential, among which he reckoned all Lucia's books and a few of his own. He had stripped himself for this last round with Fortune. He would come out of it all right if he wrote nothing but articles, lived on ten shillings a week and sold the articles; which, meant that in the weeks when no articles were sold he must live on less. It meant, too, that he must make his own bed, sweep his own room, and cook his own meals when they were cooked at all; that to have clean linen he must pay the price of many meals, as he counted meals.
The attic was not a nice place in July and August. Though the house was quiet, there flowed through it, in an incessant, suffocating, sickly stream, the untamed smells and noises of the street. For the sake of peace he took to working through the night and going to bed in the day-time; an eccentricity which caused him to be regarded with some suspicion by his neighbours. In spite of their apparent decency he had judged it expedient to keep his door locked, a lack of confidence that wounded them. The lodger in the garret next to his went so far as to signify by laughter her opinion of his unfriendly secrecy. Her own door was never shut except when he shut it. This interference with her liberty she once violently resented, delivering herself of a jet of oratory that bore with far-fetched fancy on his parentage and profession. For her threshold was her vantage ground. Upon it she stood and waited, listening for the footsteps of her luck.
It was a marvel to him how under these conditions he could turn out the amount of work he did. For some nights were as noisy as the day. There was no sort of repose about his next-door neighbour. At times she coughed all night, at times she sang. Or again, by sounds of sobbing he gathered that the poor wretch was not prospering in her trade. Still, there were long and blessed intervals of peace when she roamed farther afield; intervals which might or might not be prolonged by alcoholic stupor after her return. It may have been owing to these influences that he began to notice a decided deterioration in his prose. Hanson had returned his last article. He had worked poor Hanson's geniality for all it was worth, and he felt that in common prudence he must withdraw from theCourierfor a season. Meanwhile his best prose, the articles he had by him, remained unpublished. In war-time there was no market for such wares.
It was now October, and he had paid off but fifteen pounds of the hundred he still owed. The lease of the little house at Ealing was out at Michaelmas; he had the five pounds provided every quarter by the furniture. He sold his furniture and the last of his books, but when Dicky's bill fell due in November he was still fifty pounds to the bad. The fact that he had already paid three thousand and thirty-five would not prevent the sale and dispersal of part, and perhaps the most valuable part, of the Harden Library. In that event he would get the money, not the books, and it was the books, all the books, he wanted. He had persuaded himself that the actual redemption of the whole was the only legitimate means by which he could now approach Lucia Harden. The mere repayment of the money was a coarser and more difficult method. And now at the last moment the end, all but achieved, was as far from him as ever, supposing Dicky should refuse to renew his bill.
But Dicky did not refuse. He gave him another two months. No longer term could be conceded; but, yes, he would give him another two months. "Just for the almighty fun of the thing. If there's one thing I like to see," said Dicky, "it's pluck." Dicky was more than ever sure of his game. He argued rightly that Rickman would never have sold his books if he could have sold his articles or borrowed from a friend; that, as he had nothing else to sell or offer as security, his end was certain. But it was so glorious to see the little fellow fighting his luck. Dicky was willing to prolong the excitement for another two months.
For two months he fought it furiously.
He spent many hours of many days in trying to find work; a difficult thing when a man has cut himself loose from all his friends. Strangers were not likely to consider his superior claims when the kind of work for which he was now applying could be done by anybody as well or better. He counted himself uncommonly happy if he got a stray book to review or a job at the Museum, or if Vaughan held out the promise of giving him some translation by-and-by.
The conditions under which he worked were now appalling. It was hard to say whether the attic was more terrible in summer, or in the winter that forced him to the intimate and abominable companionship of his oil-stove. Nor was that all. A new horror was added to his existence. He was aware that he had become an object of peculiar interest to the woman in the next room, that she waited for him and stealthily watched his going out and his coming in. As he passed on the landing two eyes, dull or feverish, marked him through the chink of the door that never closed. By some hideous instinct of her kind she divined the days when he was in luck. By another instinct she divined also his nature. His mystic apathy held her brute soul in awe; and she no longer revenged herself by furious and vindictive song. So he stayed on, for he owed rent, and removals were expensive.
He found also that there were limits to the advantages of too eccentric an asceticism in diet. No doubt the strange meals he prepared for himself on his oil-stove had proved stimulating by their very strangeness; but when the first shock and surprise of them had worn off he no longer obtained that agreeable result. Perhaps there was something cloying in so much milk and cocoa; he fancied he gained by diluting these rich foods with water. It certainly seemed to him that his veins were lighter and carried a swifter and more delicate current to his brain, that his thoughts now flowed with a remarkable fineness and lucidity. And then all of a sudden the charm stopped working. What food he ate ceased to nourish him. He grew drowsy by day, and had bad dreams at night. He had not yet reached the reconciling stage of nausea, but was forever tormented by a strong and healthy craving for a square meal. There was a poor devil on the floor below him whose state in comparison with his own was affluence. That man had a square meal every Sunday. Even she, the lady of the ever-open door, was better off than he; there was always, or nearly always, a market for her wares.
His sufferings would have been unendurable if any will but his own had imposed them on him in the beginning. Not that he could continue to regard his poverty as a destiny in any way angelic. It was because hitherto he had not known the real thing, because he had seen it from very far away, that it had worn for him that divine benignant aspect. Now it was very near him; a sordid insufferable companion that dogged his elbow in the street, that sat with him by his fireless hearth, that lay beside him all night, a loathsome bedfellow, telling him a shameful, hopeless tale, and driving the blessed sleep away from him. There were times when he envied his neighbour her nirvana of gin and water; times when the gross steam of the stew prepared for the man below awoke in him acute, intolerable emotion; times when the spiritual will that dominated him, so far from being purified by abstinence, seemed merged in the will of the body made conspicuous and clamorous by hunger.
There were ways in which he might have satisfied it. He could have obtained a square meal any day from Mrs. Downey or the Spinkses; but now that the value of a square meal had increased so monstrously in imagination, his delicacy shrank from approaching his friends with conscious designs upon their hospitality. Spinks was always asking him to dine at his house in Camden Town; but he had refused because he would have had abominable suspicions of his own motives in accepting. Trust Flossie to find him out too. And latterly he had hidden himself from the eye of Spinks. There were moments now when he might have been tempted to borrow fifty pounds from Spinks and end it; but he could not bring himself to borrow from Flossie's husband. The last time he had dined with them he thought she had looked at him as if she were afraid he was going to borrow money. He knew it so well, that gleam of the black eyes, half subtle and half savage. For Flossie had realized her dream, and her little hand clung passionately to the purse that provided for Muriel Maud. He couldn't borrow from Spinky. From Jewdwine? Never. From Hanson? Hardly. From Vaughan? Possibly. Vaughan was considering the expediency of publishing his tragedy, and might be induced to advance him a little on account. Such possibilities visited him in the watches of the night, but dawn revealed their obvious futility. And yet he knew all the time he had only to go to Maddox for the money, and he would get it. To Maddox or to Rankin, Rankin whose books stood open on every bookstall, whose face in its beautiful photogravure portrait smiled so impenetrably, guarding the secret of success. But he could not go to them without giving them the explanation he was determined not to give. He knew what they thought of him; therefore he would not go to them. If they had known him better they would have come to him.
He was reminded of them now by seeing inThe Planetan obituary notice of young Paterson. Paterson had been dying slowly all the year, and December finished him. Though Rickman had been expecting the news for months, the death accomplished affected him profoundly. And at the thought of the young poet whom he had seemed to have so greatly wronged, at the touch of grief and pity and divine regret, his own genius, defied and resisted, descended on him again out of heaven. It was as if the spirit of young Paterson, appeased and reconciled, had bequeathed to him its own immortal adolescence. He finished the poem in four nights, sitting in his great coat, with his legs wrapped in his blankets, and for the last two nights drinking gin and water to keep the blood beating in his head. In the morning he felt as if it were filled with some light and crackling and infinitely brittle substance, the ashes of a brain that had kindled, flamed, and burned itself away. It was the last onslaught of the god, the last mad flaring of the divine fire.
For now he could write no longer. His whole being revolted against the labour of capturing ideas, of setting words in their right order. The least effort produced some horrible sensation. Now it was of a plunging heart that suddenly reversed engines while his brain shivered with the shock; now of a little white wave that swamped his brain with one pulse of oblivion; now it was a sudden giving way of the floor of consciousness, through which his thoughts dropped downwards headlong into the abyss. He had great agony and distress in following their flight. At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the gabble of idiocy or aphasia. At such moments he trembled for his reason.
At first these horrors would vanish in the brief brilliance that followed the act of eating; but before long, in the next stage of exhaustion, food induced nothing but a drunken drowsiness. He had once said as an excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on anything else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained the immortal Elegy was his last excess.
He sent the poem to Hanson. Hanson made no sign. But about the middle of January Rankin of all people broke the silence that had bound them for a year and a half. Rankin did not know his address, even Hanson had forgotten it. The letter had been forwarded by one of Hanson's clerks.