"My dear Rickman," it said, "where are you? And what are you doing? I dined with Hanson the other night, and he showed me your Elegy. It's too long forThe Courier, and he's sending it back to you with a string of compliments. If you have no other designs, can you let us have it forThe Planet? For Paterson's sake it ought to appear at once. My dear fellow, I should like to tell you what I think of it, but I will only state my profound conviction that you have given poor Paterson the fame he should have had and couldn't get, anymore than we could get it for him; and I, as his friend, thank you for this magnificent tribute to his genius. Will you do me the honour of dining with me on Sunday if you have nothing better to do? There are many things I should like to talk over with you, and my wife is anxious to make your acquaintance."Sincerely yours,"Herbert Rankin."PS.—Maddox is out of town at present, but you'll meet him if you come on Sunday. By the way, I saw your friend Jewdwine the other day. He explained at my request a certain matter which I own with great regret should never have required explanation."
"My dear Rickman," it said, "where are you? And what are you doing? I dined with Hanson the other night, and he showed me your Elegy. It's too long forThe Courier, and he's sending it back to you with a string of compliments. If you have no other designs, can you let us have it forThe Planet? For Paterson's sake it ought to appear at once. My dear fellow, I should like to tell you what I think of it, but I will only state my profound conviction that you have given poor Paterson the fame he should have had and couldn't get, anymore than we could get it for him; and I, as his friend, thank you for this magnificent tribute to his genius. Will you do me the honour of dining with me on Sunday if you have nothing better to do? There are many things I should like to talk over with you, and my wife is anxious to make your acquaintance.
"Sincerely yours,
"Herbert Rankin.
"PS.—Maddox is out of town at present, but you'll meet him if you come on Sunday. By the way, I saw your friend Jewdwine the other day. He explained at my request a certain matter which I own with great regret should never have required explanation."
So Jewdwine had explained. And why had not Rankin asked for the explanation sooner? Why had he had to ask for it at all? Still, it was decent of him to admit that he ought not to have required it.
He supposed that he must accept Rankin's invitation to dine. Except for his hunger, which made the prospect of dining so unique and great a thing, he had no reason for refusing. Rankin had reckoned on a scruple, and removed the ground of it. He knew that there was no approaching Rickman as long as there remained the shadow of an assumption that the explanation should have come from him.
The invitation had arrived just in time, before Rickman had sent the last saleable remnants of his wardrobe to the place where his dress-suit had gone before. He would have to apologize to Mrs. Rankin for its absence, but his serge suit was still presentable, for he had preserved it with much care, and there was one clean unfrayed shirt in his drawer.
But when Sunday came, the first febrile excitement of anticipation was succeeded by the apathy of an immense fatigue, and at the back of it all a loathsome sense of the positive indecency of his going. It was hunger that was driving him, the importunate hunger of many months, apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure. And after all could any dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it? When at the last moment he discovered a loose button on his trousers, he felt that there was no motive, no power on earth that could urge him to the task of securing it. And when it broke from its thread and fell, and hid itself under the skirting board in a sort of malignant frenzy, he took its behaviour as a sign that he would do well to forego that dinner at Rankin's. He had hardly acquiesced in this decision when reason reasserted itself and told him that everything depended on that dinner and that the dinner depended on the button; therefore that in all God's universe there was nothing so important, so essential to him as that button. He went down on his knees and dislodged the button with a penknife, after an agonizing search. He sat feebly on the edge of his bed, and with many sad, weak blasphemies bowed himself to a miserable, ignominious struggle. All malign and adverse fortunes seemed to be concentrated in the rolling, slippery, ungovernable thing.
The final victory was his, such a victory as amounted to a resurgence of the spiritual will.
All things seemed to work together to create an evening of misunderstanding rather than of reconciliation. To begin with he arrived at the Rankins' half an hour after the time appointed. Rankin lived in Sussex Square, which seemed to him an interminably long way off. The adventure with the trouser button, and a certain dizziness which precluded all swift and decided movement, would have been enough to make him late, even if he had not miscalculated the distance between Hyde Park and Bloomsbury.
He had also miscalculated the distance between Rankin the junior journalist and Rankin the celebrity. Rankin had achieved celebrity in a way he had not meant. There was a time when even Jewdwine was outdone by the young men ofThe Planetin honest contempt for the taste and judgement of the many; when it had been Rankin's task to pursue with indefatigable pleasantry the figures of popular renown. And now he was popular himself. The British public had given to him its fatal love.
At first he looked on himself as a man irretrievably disgraced. However proudly he might bear himself in the company of strangers, he approached his colleagues with the air of a man made absurd by unsolicited attentions, persecuted and compromised to the last degree. The bosses of his ruddy face displayed all the quiverings and tortures and suffusions of a smiling shame. He was, however, compensated for the loss of personal dignity by a very substantial income. Not that at first he would admit the compensation. "Ricky," he would say in the voice of a man bowed and broken on the wheel of life, "you needn't envy me my thousands. They are the measure of my abasement." Yet he continued to abase himself. Nothing was more amazing than his versatility. The public could hardly keep up with the flight of Rankin's incarnations. Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral, fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one to Rankin. An infallible instinct told him whichgenreshould be chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour of his success. And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist. But latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant's daughter) an insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate, then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence. The old ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability which was now the atmosphere of his home.
Rankin's drawing-room (where he was now waiting for Rickman) was furnished with the utmost correctness in the purest Chippendale, upholstered in silver and grey and lemon and rose brocade; it had grey curtains, rose-lined, with a design of true lovers' knots in silver; straight draperies of delicate immaculate white muslin veiled the window-panes; for the feet an interminable stretch of grey velvet carpet whose pattern lay on it like a soft shadow. Globes of electric light drooped clustering under voluminously fluted shades. Rankin himself looked grossly out of keeping with the scene. It was (and they both knew it) simply the correct setting for his wife, who dominated it, a young splendour of rose-pink and rose-white and jewelled laces and gold.
Rickman, after many weeks' imprisonment between four dirty yellow ochre walls, was bewildered with the space, the colours, the perfumes, the illumination. He was suffering from a curious and, it seemed to him, insane illusion, the illusion of distance, the magnifying of the spaces he had got to traverse, and as he entered Mrs. Rankin's drawing-room the way from the threshold to the hearthrug stretched before him as interminably as the way from Howland Street to Sussex Square. But of any other distance he was blissfully unaware. Beside his vision of Lucia Harden Mrs. Herbert Rankin was an entirely insignificant person.
Now Rankin was a little afraid of the elegant lady his wife. He had had to apologise to her many times for the curious people he brought to the house, and he was anxious that Rickman should make a good impression. He was also hungry, as hungry as a man can be who has three square meals every day of his life. Therefore he was annoyed with Rickman for being late.
But his annoyance vanished at the first sight of him. His handshake was significant of atonement and immutable affection. He introduced him almost fearlessly to his wife. He had been at some pains to impress upon her that she was about to entertain a much greater man than her husband, and that it would be very charming of her if she behaved accordingly. At this she pouted prettily, as became a bride, and he pointed out that as Keith Rickman was a poet his greatness was incommensurable with that of her husband, it left him undisturbed upon his eminence as the supreme master of prose. So that Mrs. Rankin smiled dimly and deferentially as an elegant hostess must smile upon a poet who has kept her waiting. There were two other ladies there (Rankin's mother and sister from the provinces); their greeting conveyed a rustling and excited consciousness of the guest's distinction.
As Rankin's family retreated, Maddox heaved himself forward and grasped Rickman's hand without a word.
Rickman had no very clear idea of what happened in the brief pause before dinner. His first sensation was one of confused beatitude and warmth, of being received into an enfolding atmosphere of friendliness. He was sure it was friendliness that made Maddox pluck him by the arm and draw him down beside him on the sofa; and he was too tired to wonder why Maddy should think it necessary to whisper into his collar, "Steady, you'll be all right if you sit still, old man." The strange voices of the women confused him further, and standing made him giddy: he was glad to sit still in his corner obliterated by Maddy's colossal shoulders. It was friendliness, he knew, that made Rankin dispense with ceremony and pilot him through those never-ending spaces to the dining-room. And it must have been an exaggeration of the same feeling that made him (regardless of his wife's uplifted eyebrows) insist on placing the guest of the evening between Maddox and himself. It was later on, about the time when the wine went round, that Rickman became aware of a change, of a subtle undefined hostility in the air. He wondered whether the Rankins were annoyed with him because of his inability to take a brilliant part in the conversation or to finish any one thing that he took upon his plate. But for the life of him he couldn't help it. He was too tired to talk, and he had reached that stage of hunger when the desire to eat no longer brought with it the power of eating, when the masterpieces of Rankin'schefexcited only terror and repugnance. He ate sparingly as starving men must eat, and he drank more sparingly than he ate; for he feared the probable effect of unwonted stimulants. So that his glass appeared ever to be full.
The hostility was more Mrs. Herbert Rankin's attitude than that of her husband, but he noticed a melancholy change in Rankin. His geniality had vanished, or lingered only in the curl of his moustache. He was less amusing than of old. His conversation was no longer that of the light-hearted junior journalist flinging himself recklessly into the tide of talk; but whatever topic was started he turned it to himself. He was exceedingly indignant on the subject of the war, which he regarded more as a personal grievance than as a national calamity. No doubt it was his eminence that constituted him the centre of so vast a range.
"The worst of it is," said he, "whichever side beats it's destruction to royalties. I lost a clean thousand on Spion Kop and I can tell you I didn't recover much on Mafeking, though I worked Tommy Atkins for all he was worth. This year my sales have dropped from fifty to thirty thousand. I can't stand many more of these reverses."
He paused, dubious, between twoentrées.
"If it's had that effect onme," said the great man, "Heaven only knows what it's done to other people. How about you, Rickman?"
"Oh, I'm all right, thanks." The war had ruined him, but his ruin was not the point of view from which he had yet seriously regarded it. He was frankly disgusted with his old friend's tone.
"If it goes on much longer, I shall be obliged," said Rankin solemnly, "to go out to the seat of war."
Rickman felt a momentary glow. He was exhilarated by the idea of Rankin at the seat of war. He said he could see Rankin sitting on it.
Rankin laughed, for he was not wholly dead to the humour of his own celebrity; but there was a faint silken rustle at the head of the table, subtle and hostile, like the stirring of a snake. Mrs. Herbert Rankin bent her fine flat brows towards the poet, with a look ominous and intent. The look was lost upon Rickman and he wondered why Maddox pressed his foot.
"Have you written anything on the war, Mr. Rickman?" she asked.
"No; I haven't written anything on the war."
She looked at him almost contemptuously as at a fool who had neglected an opportunity.
"What do you generally write on, then?"
Rickman looked up with a piteous smile. He was beginning to feel very miserable and weary, and he longed to get up and go. It seemed to him that there was no end to that dinner; no end to the pitiless ingenuity of Rankin'schef. And he always had hated being stared at.
"I don't—generally—write—on anything," he said.
"Your last poem is an exception to your rule, then?"
"It is. I wrote most ofthaton gin and water," said Rickman desperately.
Rankin had tugged all the geniality out of his moustache, and his face was full of anxiety and gloom. Maddox tried hard not to snigger. He was not fond of Mrs. Herbert Rankin.
And Rankin'schefcontinued to send forth his swift and fair creations.
Rickman felt his forehead grow cold and damp. He leaned back and wiped it with his handkerchief. A glance passed between Maddox and Rankin. But old Mrs. Rankin looked at him and the motherhood stirred in her heart.
"Won't you change places with me? I expect you're feeling that fire too much at your back."
Maddox plucked his sleeve. "Better stay where you are," he whispered.
Rickman rose instantly to his feet. The horrible conviction was growing on him that he was going to faint, to faint or to be ignominiously ill. That came sometimes of starving, by some irony of Nature.
"Don't Maddy—I think perhaps—"
Surely he was going to faint.
Maddox jumped up and held him as he staggered from the room.
Rankin looked at his wife and his wife looked at Rankin. "He may be a very great poet," said she, "but I hope you'll never ask him to dine here again."
"Never. I can promise you," said Rankin.
The mother had a kinder voice. "I think the poor fellow was feeling ill from that fire."
"Well he might, too," said Rankin with all the bitterness that became the husband of elegant respectability.
"Go and make him lie down and be sure and keep his head lower than his feet," said Rankin's mother.
"I shouldn't be surprised if Ricky's head were considerably lower than his feet already," said Rankin. And when he said it the bosses of his face grew genial again as the old coarse junior journalistic humour possessed itself of the situation. And he went out sniggering and cursing by turns under his moustache.
Rankin's mother was right. Rickman was feeling very ill indeed. Without knowing how he got there he found himself lying on a bed in Rankin's dressing-room. Maddox and Rankin were with him. Maddox had taken off his boots and loosened his collar for him, and was now standing over him contemplating the effect.
"That's all very well," said Maddox, "but how the dickens am I to get him home? Especially as we don't know his address."
"Ask him."
"I'm afraid our Ricky-ticky's hardly in a state to give very reliable information."
"Sixty-five Howland Street," said Rickman faintly, and the two smiled.
"It was Torrington Square, but I forget the number."
"Sixty-five Howland Street," repeated Rickman with an effort to be distinct.
Maddox shook his head. Rickman had sunk low enough, but it was incredible to them that he should have sunk as low as Howland Street. His insistence on that address they regarded as a pleasantry peculiar to his state. "It's perfectly hopeless," said Maddox. "I don't see anything for it, Rankin, but to let him stay where he is."
At that Rickman roused himself from his stupor. "If you'd only stop jawing and give me some brandy, I could go."
"Oh my Aunt!" said Rankin, dallying with his despair.
"It isn't half a bad idea. Try it."
They tried it. Maddox raised the poet's head and Rankin poured the brandy into him. Rankin's hand was gentle, but there was a sternness about Maddox and his ministrations. And as the brandy brought the blood back to his brain, Rickman sat up on Rankin's bed, murmuring apologies that would have drawn pity from the nether mill-stone. But there was no sign of the tenderness that had warmed him when he came. He could see that they were anxious to get him out of the house. Since they had been so keen on reconciliation whence this change to hostility and disapproval? Oh, of course, he remembered; he had been ill (outrageously ill) in Rankin's dressing-room. Perhaps it wasn't very nice of him; still he didn't do it for his own amusement, and Rankin might have been as ill as he liked inhisdressing-room, if he had had one. Even admitting that the nature of his calamity was such as to place him beyond the pale of human sympathy, he thought that Rankin might have borne himself with a somewhat better grace. And why Maddox should have taken that preposterous tone—
Maddox explained himself as they left Sussex Square.
Rickman did not at first take in the explanation. He was thinking how he could best circumvent Maddox's obvious intention of hailing a hansom and putting him into it. He didn't want to confess that he hadn't a shilling in his pocket. Coppers anybody may be short of, and presently he meant to borrow twopence for a bus. Later on he would have to ask for a loan of fifty pounds; for you can borrow pounds and you can borrow pennies, but not shillings. Not at any rate if you are starving.
"If I were you, Ricky," Maddox was saying. "I should go straight to bed when you get home. You'll be all right in the morning."
"I'm all right now. I can't think what bowled me over."
"Ricky, the prevarication is unworthy of you. Without humbug, I think you might keep off it a bit before you dine with people. It doesn't matter about us, you know, but it's hardly the sort of thing Mrs. Rankin's been accustomed to."
"Mrs. Rankin?"
"Well yes, I said Mrs. Rankin; but it's not about her I care—it's about you. Of course you'll tell me to mind my own business, but I wish—I wish to goodness you'd give it up—altogether. You did once, why not again? Believe me the game isn't worth the candle." And he said to himself, noting the sharp lines of his friend's haggard figure, "It's killing him."
"I see," said Rickman slowly. In an instant he saw it all; the monstrous and abominable suspicion that had rested upon him all the evening. It explained everything. He saw, too, how every movement of his own had lent itself to the intolerable inference. It was so complete, so satisfactory, so comprehensive, that he could not wonder that they had found no escape from it. He could find none himself. There was no way by which he could establish the fact of his sobriety; for it is the very nature of such accusations to feed upon defence. Denial, whether humorous or indignant, would but condemn him more. The very plausibility of the imputation acted on him as a despotic suggestion. He began to feel that he must have been drunk at Rankin's; that he was drunk now while he was talking to Maddox. And to have told the truth, to have said, "Maddy, I'm starving. I haven't had a square meal for four months," would have sounded too like a beggar's whine. Whatever he let out later on, it would be mean to spring all that on Maddox now, covering him with confusion and remorse.
He laughed softly, aware that his very laugh would be used as evidence against him. "I see. So you all thought I'd been drinking?"
"Well—if you'll forgive my saying so—"
"Oh, I forgive you. It was a very natural supposition."
"I think you'll have to apologise to the Rankins."
"I think the Rankins'll have to apologise to me."
With every foolish word he was more hopelessly immersed.
He insisted on parting with Maddox at the Marble Arch. After all, he had not borrowed that fifty pounds nor yet that twopence. Luckily Rankin's brandy enabled him to walk back with less difficulty than he came. It had also warmed him, so that he did not find out all at once that he had left his overcoat at Rankin's. He could not go back for it. He could never present himself at that house again.
It was a frosty night with a bitter wind rising in the east and blowing up Oxford Street. His attic under the icicled tiles was dark and narrow as the grave. And on the other side of the thin wall a Hunger, more infernal and malignant than his own, waited stealthily for its prey.
It was five o'clock, and Dicky Pilkington was at his ease stretched before the fire in a low chair in the drawing-room of the flat he now habitually shared with Poppy Grace. It was beatitude to lie there with his legs nicely toasting, to have his tea (which he did not drink) poured out for him by the most popular little variety actress in London, and to know that she had found in him her master. This evening, his intellect in play under many genial influences, Dicky was once more raising the pæan of Finance. Under some piquant provocation, too; for Poppy had just informed him, that she "didn't fancy his business."
"Now, look here," said Dicky, "you call yourself an artist. Well—this business of mine isn't a business, it's an art. Think of the delicacy we 'ave to use. To know to a hairsbreadth how far you can go with a man, to know when to give him his head with the snaffle and when to draw him in with the curb. It's a feelin' your way all along. Why, I knew a fellow, a broker—an uncommonly clever chap he was, too—ruined just for want of a little tact. He was too precipitate, began hauling his man up just when he ought to have let him go. He'd no imagination, that fellow. (Don't you go eating too much cake, Popsie, or you'll make your little nose red.) I don't know any other profession gives you such a grip of life and such a feelin' of power. You've got some young devil plungin' about, kickin' up his heels all over the shop, say. He thinks he's got the whole place to break his neck in; and you know the exact minute by your watch that you can bring him in grovellin' on your office floor. It's the iron 'and in the velvet glove," said Dicky.
"I know what you're driving at, and I call it a beastly shame."
"No, it isn't. I shouldn't wonder if old Rickets paid up all right, after all."
"And if he doesn't?"
"If he doesn't—Well—"
"I say, though, think wot a lot he's paid you. Can't you let him go?"
Dicky shook his head and smiled softly as at some interior vision.
"You'll ruin him for a dirty fifty pounds?"
"I won't ruin him. And it isn't for the money, it's for the game. I like," said Dicky, "to see a man play in first-class style. But I don't blame him if he hasn't got style so long as he's got pluck. In fact, I don't know that of the two I wouldn't rather have pluck. I've seen a good many men play this game, but I've never seen any one who came up to old Razors for pluckandstyle. It's a treat to see him. Do you suppose I'm going to cut in now and spoil it all by giving him points? That would take all the gilt off the gingerbread. And do you suppose he'd let me? Not he; he's spreading the gilt on thick, and he'd see me d——d first."
Dicky smoked, with half-closed eyes fixed on the fire, in speechless admiration. He felt that he was encouraging the display of high heroism by watching it. He singled out a beautiful writhing flame, spat at it, and continued: "No, I'll take good care that Rickets doesn't starve. But I'm going to stand by and see him finish fair. If you like, Popsie, you can back him to win. I don't care if hedoe'win. It would be worth it for what I've got out of him."
By what he had got out of him Dicky meant, not three thousand seven hundred and odd pounds, but a spectacle beyond all comparison exciting and sublime. For that he was prepared to abandon any further advantage that might be wrung from the Harden library by a successful manipulation of the sales.
Poppy did not back Rickman to win; but she determined to call on him at his rooms, and leave a little note with a cheque and a request that he would pay Dicky and have done with him. "You'd better owe it to me than to him, old chappy"; thus she wrote in the kindness and impropriety of her heart. But Rickman never got that little note.
Of all the consequences of that terrible dinner at Rankin's there was none that Rickman resented more than the loss of his overcoat. As he lay between his blankets he still felt all the lashings of the east wind around his shivering body. He was awake all that night, and the morning found him feverish with terror of the illness that might overtake him before he attained his end. He stayed in bed all day to prevent it, and because of his weakness, and for warmth.
But the next day there came a mild and merciful thaw, a tenderness of Heaven that was felt even under the tiles in Howland Street. And the morning of that day brought a thing that in all his dreams he had not yet dreamed of, a letter from Lucia.
He read it kneeling on the floor of his garret, supporting himself by the edge of the table. It was only a few lines in praise of the Elegy (which had appeared inThe Planetthe week before) and a postscript that told him she would be staying at Court House with Miss Palliser till the summer.
He knelt there a long time with his head bowed upon his arms. His brains failed him when he tried to write an answer, and he put the letter into his breast-pocket, where it lay like a loving hand against his heart. And yet there was not a word of love in it.
The old indomitable hope rose in his heart again and he forced himself to eat and drink, that he might have strength for the things he had to do. That night he did not sleep, but lay wrapt in his beatific passion. His longing was so intense that it created a vision of the thing it longed for. It seemed to him that he heard Lucia's soft footfall about his bed, that she came and sat beside his pillow, that she bowed her head upon his breast, and that her long hair drifted over him. For the beating of his own heart gave him the sense of a presence beside him all night long, as he lay with his right arm flung across his own starved body, guarding her letter, the letter that had not a word of love in it.
In the morning he discovered that another letter had lain on his table under Lucia's. It was from Dicky Pilkington, reminding him that it wanted but seven days to the thirtieth. Dicky said nothing about any willingness to renew the bill. What did it matter? Dicky would renew it, Dicky must renew it; he felt that there was force in him to compel Dicky to renew it. He went out and bought a paper with the price of a meal of milk (he couldn't pawn his good clothes; their assistance was too valuable in interviews with possible employers). He found the advertisement of an Exeter bookseller in want of a foreman and expert cataloguer at a salary of ninety pounds. He answered it by return. In the list of his credentials he mentioned that he had catalogued the Harden library (a feat, as he knew, sufficient to constitute him a celebrity in the eyes of the Exeter man). He added that if the bookseller felt inclined to consider his application he would be obliged by a wire, as he had several other situations in view.
The bookseller wired engaging him for six months. The same day came a cheque for ten pounds fromThe Planet, the honorarium for the Elegy. He sent the ten pounds to Dicky at once (by way of showing what he could do) with a curt note informing him of his appointment and requesting a renewal for three months, by which time his salary would cover the remainder still owing.
Feeling that no further intellectual efforts were now required of him he went out to feed on the fresh air. As he crossed the landing an odour of hot pottage came to meet him. Through the ever-open door he caught a glimpse of a woman's form throned, as it were, above clouds of curling steam. A voice went out, hoarse with a supreme emotion.
"Come in, you there, and 'ave a snack, wontcher?" it said.
"No, thank you," he answered.
"Garn then. I'll snack yer for a ——y fool!"
And from the peaceableness of the reply he gathered that this time the lady was not soliciting patronage but conferring it.
He was no longer hungry, no longer weighed upon by his exhausted body. A great restlessness had seized it, a desire to walk, to walk on and on without stopping. The young day had lured him into the Regent's Park. So gentle was the weather that, but for bare branches and blanched sky, it might have been a day in Spring. As he walked he experienced sensations of indescribable delicacy and lightness, he saw ahead of him pellucid golden vistas of metaphysical splendour, he skimmed over fields of elastic air with the ease and ecstasy of a blessed spirit.
When he came in he found that the experience prolonged itself through the early night, even when he lay motionless on his bed staring at the wall. And as he stared it seemed to him that there passed upon the wall clouds upon clouds of exquisite and evanescent colour, and that strange forms appeared and moved upon the clouds. He saw a shoal of fishes (theywerefishes, radiant, iridescent, gorgeous fishes, with the tails of peacocks); they swam round and round the room just under the cornice, an ever-revolving, ever-floating frieze. He was immensely interested in these decorative hallucinations. His brain seemed to be lifted up, to be iridescent also, to swim round and round with the swimming fishes.
He woke late in the morning with a violent sore throat and pain in all his body. He was too giddy to sit up and help himself, but he knocked weakly on the thin wall. His neighbour roused herself at the faint summons and appeared. She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips and contemplated him for a moment. He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to be stuck burning to the roof of his mouth. He pointed to his throat.
"Yes, I dessay," said she. "I said you'd get somefing and you've got it." So saying she disappeared into her own apartment.
As he saw her go despair shook him. He thought that he was abandoned. But presently she returned, bringing a cup of hot tea with a dash of gin in it from her own breakfast.
"I'd a seen to you afore ef you'd let me," she said. "You tyke it from me, young man, wot you wants is a good hot lining to your belly. I'd 'ave given it to you ef you'd a let me. I'm a lydy as tykes her dinner reg'ler, I am. No, you don't—" This, as he turned away his head in protest. She however secured it firmly with one filthy hand, while with the other she held the reeking cup to his lips. She had put it to her own first to test the heat and quality of the brew. Yet he was grateful. He had some difficulty in swallowing; and from time to time she wiped his mouth with her villainous apron; and he was grateful still, having passed beyond disgust.
She perceived the gratitude. "Garn," said she, "wot's a cup er tea? I'd a seen to yer afore ef you'd a let me."
She continued her ministrations; she brought coal in her own scuttle and after immense pains she lighted a fire in the wretched grate. Then she smoothed his bed-clothes till they were covered with her smutty trail. She would have gone for a doctor then and there, but difficulty arose. For doctors meant hospitals, and the man below threatened to sell his lodger's "sticks" if rent were not forthcoming. She cast her eyes about in search of pawnable articles. They fell upon his clothes. She took up his shirt and examined it carefully, appraising the sleeve links and the studs. But when she touched the coat, the coat that had Lucia's letter in the breast-pocket, Rickman turned in his bed and made agonizing signs, struggling with the voice that perished in his burning throat.
"Wot's the good," said she, "of a suit when yer can't wear it? As I telled you wot you wa—No, the's no sorter use your making fyces at me. And you keep your ——y legs in, or I'll—" The propositions that followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother might have used to soothe a fractious child. She went away, carrying the clothes with her, and turned out the pockets in her den.
On her return she sent the man below to fetch the doctor. But the man below fell in with boon companions on the way, and no doctor came. All that night the woman watched by Rickman's bedside, heedless of her luck. She kept life in him by feeding him with warm milk and gin, a teaspoonful at a time. Rickman, aware of footsteps in the room, fancied himself back again in Rankin's dressing-room. The whole scene of that evening floated before him all night long. He had a sense of presences hostile and offended, of being irretrievably disgraced. In the recurring nightmare he saw Lucia Harden instead of Mrs. Rankin. So persistently did he see her that when he woke he could not shake off the impression that she had been actually, if unaccountably, present, a spectator of his uttermost disgrace. He could never look her in the face again. No, for he was disgraced; absolutely, irredeemably, atrociously disgraced. Beyond all possibility of explanation and defence; though he sometimes caught himself explaining and pleading against those offended phantoms of his brain. Why should he suffer so? Just because of his inability to deal with Rankin's never-ending dinner, or to pay a debt of millions, many millions of figures that climbed up the wall. He was not sure which of these two obligations was laid upon him.
He became by turns delirious and drowsy, and the woman fetched a doctor early the next day. He found enteric and blood-poisoning also, of which Rickman's illness at the Rankins' must have been the first warning symptoms.
"He'll have to go to the hospital; but you'd better send word to his friends."
"'E ain't got no friends. AndIdunno 'oo 'e is."
The doctor said to himself, "Gone under," and looked round him for a clue. He examined a postcard from Spinks and a parcel (containing an overcoat) from Rankin, with the novelist's name and address inside the wrapper. The poet's name was familiar to the doctor, who readMetropolis. He first of all made arrangements for removing his patient to the hospital. Then in his uncertainty he telegraphed to Jewdwine, to Rankin and to Spinks.
The news of Rickman's illness was thus spread rapidly among his friends. It brought Spinks that afternoon, and Flossie, the poor Beaver, dragged to Howland Street by her husband to see what her woman's hands could do. They entered upon a scene of indescribable confusion and clangour. Poppy Grace, arrived on her errand (for which she had attired herself in a red dress and ermine tippet), had mounted guard over the unconscious poet.
"Ricky," cried Poppy, bending over him, "won't you speak to me? It's Poppy, dear. Don't you know me?"
"No, 'e don't know yer, so you needn't arsk 'im."
Poppy placed her minute figure defiantly between Rickman and her rival of the open door. She had exhausted her emotions in those wild cries, and was prepared to enjoy the moment which produced in her the hallucination of self-conscious virtue.
The woman, voluble and fierce, began to describe Miss Grace's character in powerful but somewhat exaggerated language, appealing to the new-comers to vindicate her accuracy. Poppy seated herself on the bed and held a pocket-handkerchief to her virtuous nose. It was the dumb and dignified rebuke of Propriety in an ermine tippet, to Vice made manifest in the infamy of rags. The Beaver retreated in terror on to the landing, where she stood clutching the little basket of jellies and things which she had brought, as if she feared that it might be torn from her in the violence of the scene. Spinks, convulsed with anguish by the sight of his friend lying there unconscious, could only offer an inarticulate expostulation. It was the signal for the woman to burst into passionate self-defence.
"I ain't took nothing 'cept wot the boss 'e myde me. 'Go fer a doctor?' ses 'e. 'No you don't. I don't 'ave no ——y doctor messing round 'ere an' cartin' 'im orf to the 'orspital afore 'e's paid 'is rent.' Ses 'e 'I'm—"
The entrance of Maddox and Rankin checked the hideous flow. They were followed by the porters of the hospital and the nurse in charge. Her presence commanded instantaneous calm.
"There are far too many people in this room," said she. Her expelling glance fell first on Poppy, throned on the bed, then on the convulsive Spinks. She turned more gently to Rankin, in whose mouth she saw remonstrance, and to Maddox, in whose eyes she read despair. "It will really be better for him to take him to the hospital."
"No," cried Spinks, darting in again from the landing, "take him to my house, 45, Dalmeny Av—" but the Beaver plucked him by the sleeve; for she thought of Muriel Maud.
"No, no, take him to mine, 87, Sussex Square," said Rankin, and he insisted. But in the end he suffered himself to be overruled; for he thought darkly of his wife.
"I'd give half my popularity if I could save him," he said to Maddox.
"Half your popularity won't save him, nor yet the whole of it," said Maddox savagely. In that moment they hated themselves and each other for the wrong they had done him. Their hearts smote them as they thought of the brutalities of Sunday night.
The woman still held her ground in the centre of the room where she stood scowling at the nurse as she busied herself about the bed.
"I'd a seen to 'im ef 'e'd a let me," she reiterated.
Maddox dealt with her. He flicked a sovereign on to the table. "Look here," said he, "suppose you take that and go out quietly."
There was a momentary glitter in her eyes, but her fingers hesitated.
"I didn' fink 'e 'ad no frien's wen I come in." It was her way of intimating that what she had done she had not done for money.
"All right, take it."
She drew out a filthy grey flannel bag from the bosom of her gown and slipped the gold into it. And still she hesitated. She could not understand why so large a sum was offered for such slight services as she had rendered. It must have been for—Another thought stirred in her brute brain.
They were raising Rickman in his bed before taking him away. His shoulders were supported on the nurse's arm, his head dropped on her breast. The posture revealed all the weakness of his slender body. The woman turned. And as she looked at the helpless figure she was visited by a dim sense of something strange and beautiful and pure, something (his helplessness perhaps) that was outraged by her presence, and called for vindication.
"'E never 'ad no truck with me," she said. It struck Maddox that the denial had a sublimity and pathos of its own. She dropped the bag into her lean bosom and went out.
And the porters wrapped him in his blankets, and laid him on a stretcher, and carried him out; past Maddox and Rankin who turned their heads away; past Flossie who shrank a little from the blankets, but cried softly to see him go; and past the woman standing on her threshold. And in that manner he passed Horace Jewdwine coming up the stair too late. And all that Jewdwine could do was to stand back and let him pass.
It was Jewdwine's fear that made him uncover, as in the presence of the dead.
When Rankin, Maddox and Jewdwine stood alone in the garret whence they had seen Rickman carried away from them, remorse drove all hope of his recovery from their hearts. They learnt some of the truth about him from the woman in the next room, a keen observer of human nature. Jewdwine and Rankin, when they too had paid her for her services, were glad to escape from the intolerable scene. Maddox stayed behind, collecting what he could only think of as Rickman's literary remains.
He found in the table drawer three unpublished articles, a few poems, and the First Act of the second and unfinished tragedy, saved by its obscure position at the back of the drawer. The woman owned to having lit the fire with the rest. Maddox cursed and groaned as he thought of that destruction. He knew that many poems which followedSaturnaliahad remained unpublished. Had they too been taken to light the fire? He turned the garret upside down in search of the missing manuscripts. At last in a cupboard, he came upon a leather bag. It was locked and he could find no key, but he wrenched it open with the poker. It contained many manuscripts; among them the Nine and Twenty Sonnets, and the testament concerning them. He read the Sonnets, but not the other document which was in a sealed envelope. He found also a bundle of Dicky Pilkington's receipts and his last letter threatening foreclosure. And when he had packed up the books (Lucia's books) and redeemed Rickman's clothes from the pawn-shop, he took all these things away with him for safety.
There was little he could do for Rickman, but he promised himself the pleasure of settling Dicky's claim. But even that satisfaction was denied him. For Dicky had just renewed his bill for a nominal three months. Nominal only. Dicky had in view a magnificent renunciation, and he flatly refused to treat with Maddox or anybody else. He was completely satisfied with this conclusion; it meant that Rickman, for all his style and pluck, had lost the game and that he, Pilkington, had done the handsome thing, as he could do it when the fancy took him. For Dicky's heart had been touched by the tale that Poppy told him, and it melted altogether when he went and saw for himself poor Ricky lying in his cot in the North-Western Hospital. He had a great deal of nice feeling about him after all, had Dicky.
Terrible days followed Rickman's removal to the hospital; days when his friends seemed justified in their sad conviction; days when the doctors gave up hope; days when he would relapse after some brief recovery; days when he kept them all in agonizing suspense.
But Rickman did not die. As they said, it was not in him to take that exquisitely mean revenge. It was not in him to truckle to the tradition that ordains that unfortunate young poets shall starve in garrets and die in hospitals. He had always been an upsetter of conventions, and a law unto himself. So there came a day, about the middle of March, when he astonished them all by appearing among them suddenly in Maddox's rooms, less haggard than he had been that night when he sat starving at Rankin's dinner-table.
And as he came back to them, to Jewdwine, to Maddox and to Rankin, they each could say no more to him than they had said five years ago. "What a fool you were, Rickman. Why didn't you come tome?" But when the others had left, Maddox put his hands on Rickman's shoulders and they looked each other in the face.
"I say, Ricky, what did you do it for?"
But that was more than Rickman could explain, even to Maddox.
They had all contended which should receive him when he came out of hospital; but it was settled that for the present he should remain with Maddox in his rooms. There Dicky, absolutely prepared to do the handsome thing, called upon him at an early date. Dicky had promised himself some exquisite sensations in the moment of magnanimity; but the moment never came. Rickman remained firm in his determination that every shilling of the debt should be paid and paid by him; it was more than covered by the money Maddox advanced for his literary remains. Dicky had to own that the plucky little fellow had won his game, but he added, "You couldn't have done it, Razors, if I hadn't given you points."
The great thing was that he had done it, and that the Harden library was his, was Lucia's. It only remained to tell her, and to hand it over to her. He had long ago provided for this difficult affair. He wrote, as he had planned to write, with a judicious hardness, brevity and restraint. He told her that he desired to see her on some business connected with the Harden library, in which he was endeavouring to carry out as far as possible his father's last wishes. He asked to be allowed to call on her some afternoon in the following week. He thanked her for her letter without further reference, and he remained—"sincerely"? No, "faithfully" hers.
He told Maddox that he thought of going down to Devonshire to recruit.