"Oh, he is such a nice little boy,When there's nothing you do to annoy;But he's apt to stand aloofIf you arsk him for the oof,And it's then that he looks coy.Oh, he'll show the cloven hoof,If you put him to the proof.When you want him to hand you the boodleHe'snotsuch a nice little boy.
"Oh, he is such a nice little boy,When there's nothing you do to annoy;But he's apt to stand aloofIf you arsk him for the oof,And it's then that he looks coy.Oh, he'll show the cloven hoof,If you put him to the proof.When you want him to hand you the boodleHe'snotsuch a nice little boy.
"Yes, dickee,Isee you!"
The canary, persuaded by Poppy's song that it was broad daylight, was awake and splashing in his bath. Again in Poppy's mind (how unnecessarily) he stood for the respectabilities and proprieties; he was an understudy for Tiny of the dirty tea-gown.
"Going?"
"Yes. I must go."
"Wait." She rose and held him by the collar of his coat, a lapel in each small hand. He grasped her wrists by an instinctive movement of self-preservation, and gently slackened her hold. She gave his coat a little shake. "What's the matter with you, Rickets? You're such a howling swell."
Her eyes twinkled in the old way, and he smiled in spite of himself.
"Say, I'm a little nuisance, Rickets,sayI'm a little nuisance."
"You are a little nuisance.
"A d——d little nuisance."
"A d——d little nuisance."
"Ah, now you feel better, don't you? Poor Ricky-ticky, don't you be afraid. It's only alittlenuisance. It'll never be a big one. It's done growing. That is, I won't rag you any more, if you'll tell me one thing—oh, what a whopper of a sigh!—Promise me you'll pay Dicky off."
"All right. I'll pay him."
"To-morrow?"
"To-morrow, then. Don't, Poppy. I—I've got a sore throat." For Poppy, standing on tip-toe, had made an effort to embrace him.
"I sy, if you blush like that, Rickets, you'll have a fit. Poor dear!DidI crumple his nice little stylish collar!"
He endured while she smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle, her head very much on one side. "You see, Razors, we've been such chums. Whatever happens, I want to be all right and straight with you."
"What should happen?"
"Oh, anything." Again there was that troubling of the bright shallows of her eyes. "You remember larst time you were here?" (his shudder told her that he remembered well). "Ididtry to send you away, didn't I?"
"As far as I can remember, you did."
"What did you think I did it for?"
"I suppose, because you wanted me to go."
"Stupid! I did it because I wanted you tostay." She looked into his eyes and the light went out of her own; among its paint and powder her audacity lay dead. It was as if she saw on his face the shadow of Lucia Harden, and knew that her hour had come.
She met it laughing. "Good-night, Ricky-ticky."
As he took her hand he muttered something about being "fearfully sorry."
"Sorry?" Poppy conjured up a poor flickering ghost of her inimitable wink. "The champagne was bad, dear. Don't you worry."
When he had left her, she flung herself face downwards on the divan. "Oh, dicky, will you hold your horrid little tongue?" But as she sobbed aloud, the canary, symbol of invincible Propriety, rocked on his perch and shook over her his piercing and exultant song.
Rickman was sorry for her, but the sight and touch of her were hateful to him. He took her advice however. He had had good luck with some articles, and he called on Pilkington the next afternoon and paid him his thirty pounds with the interest. Dicky was in a good humour and inclined to be communicative. He congratulated him on his present berth, and informed him that Rickman's was "going it." The old man had just raised four thousand on the Harden library, the only security that he, Dicky, would accept.
"I suppose," said Rickman simply, "you'd no idea of its value when you let him buy it?"
Dicky stared through his eye-glass with his blue eyes immense and clear.
"My dear fellow, do you take me for a d——d fool?"
So that had been Dicky's little game? Trust Dicky.
And yet for the time being, held in the opposing grip of two firm cupidities, it was safe, the great Harden library, once the joy of scholars, loved with such high intellectual passion, and now the centre of so many hot schemes and rivalries and lusts. Now that the work of sacrilege was complete, housed at last in the Gin Palace of Art, it stood, useless in its desecrated beauty, cumbering the shelves whence no sale would remove it until either Rickman's or Pilkington let go. So far the Hardens were avenged.
More than once, after that night when Rickman dined with him, Jewdwine became the prey of many misgivings. He felt that in taking Rickman up he was assuming an immense responsibility. It might have been better, happier for Rickman, poor fellow, if after all he had left him in his decent obscurity; but having dragged him out of it, he was in a manner answerable to the world for Rickman and to Rickman for the world. Supposing Rickman disappointed the world? Supposing the world disappointed Rickman?
Jewdwine lived in the hope, natural to a distinguished critic, of some day lighting upon a genius. The glory of that find would go far to compensate him for his daily traffic with mediocrity. Genius was rarely to be seen, but Jewdwine felt that he would be the first to recognize it if he did see it; the first to penetrate its many curious disguises; the first to give it an introduction (if it wanted one) to his own superior world. And here was Rickman—manifestly in need of that introduction—a man who unquestionably had about him some of the marks by which a genius is identified; and yet he left you terribly uncertain. He was the very incarnation of uncertainty. Jewdwine was perfectly willing to help the man if only he were sure of the genius. But was he sure? Had it really pleased the inscrutable divine thing to take up its abode in this otherwise rather impossible person?
Meanwhile Rickman seemed to be settling down fairly comfortably to the work ofThe Museion; and Jewdwine, having other things to think of, began to forget his existence. He was in fact rapidly realizing his dream. He had won for himself and his paper a position lonely and unique. The reputation ofThe Museionwas out of all proportion to its circulation, but Jewdwine was making himself heard. As an editor and critic he was respected for his incorruptibility and for the purity of his passion for literature. His utterances were considered to carry authority and weight.
Just at first the weight was perhaps the more conspicuous quality of the two. Jewdwine could not be parted from his "Absolute." He had lived with it for years in Oxford, and he brought it up to town with him; it walked beside him on the London pavements and beckoned him incessantly into the vast inane. It cut a very majestic figure in his columns, till some irritable compositor docked it of its capital and compelled it to march with the rank and file of vulgar adjectives. Even thus degraded it ruled his paragraphs as it ruled his thoughts.
But lately the review seemed to be making efforts to redeem itself from the charge of heaviness. In certain of its columns there was a curious radiance and agitation, as of some winged and luminous creature struggling against obscurity; and it was felt that Jewdwine was binding in a pious tradition of dulness a spirit that would otherwise have danced and flown. Whether it was his own spirit or somebody else's did not definitely appear; but now and again it broke loose altogether, and then, when people complimented him on the brilliance of his appearance that week, he smiled inscrutably.
It was impossible to say how far Jewdwine's conscience approved of these outbursts of individuality. Certainly he did his best to restrain them, his desire being to give to his columns a distinguished unity of form. He saw himself the founder of a new and higher school of journalism, thus satisfying his undying tutorial instincts. He had chosen his staff from the most promising among the young band of disciples who thronged his lecture-room at Oxford; men moulded on his methods, inspired by his ideals, drenched in his metaphysics; crude young men of uncontrollable enthusiasm, whose style awaited at his hands the final polishing.
He knew that he had done a risky thing in associating young Rickman with them in this high enterprise. But under all his doubts there lay a faith in the genius of his sub-editor, a faith the more fascinating because it was so far removed from any certainty. In giving Rickman his present post he conceived himself not only to be paying a debt of honour, but doing the best possible thing forThe Museion. It was also, he considered, the best possible thing for Rickman. His work on the review would give him the discipline he most needed, the discipline he had never had. To be brought into line with an august tradition; to be caught up out of the slough of modern journalism into a rarer atmosphere; to breathe the eternal spirit of great literature (a spirit which according to Jewdwine did not blow altogether where it listed); to have his too exuberant individuality chastened and controlled, would be for Rickman an unspeakable benefit at this critical stage of his career.
The chastening and controlling were difficult. Rickman's phrases were frequently more powerful than polite. Like many young writers of violent imagination he was apt to be somewhat vividly erotic in his metaphors. And he had little ways that were very irritating to Jewdwine. He was wasteful with the office paper and with string; he would use penny stamps where halfpenny ones would have served his purpose; he had once permitted himself to differ with Jewdwine on a point of scholarship in the presence of the junior clerk. There were times when Jewdwine longed to turn him out and have done with him; and yet Rickman stayed on. When all was said and done there was a charm about him. Jewdwine in fact had proved the truth of Lucia's saying; he could rely absolutely on his devotion. He could not afford to let him go. Though Rickman tampered shamelessly with the traditions of the review, it could not be said that as yet he had injured its circulation. His contributions were noticed with approval in rival columns; and they had even been quoted by Continental critics with whomThe Museionpassed as being the only British review that had the true interests of literature at heart.
But though Rickman helped to bring fame toThe Museion,The Museionbrought none to him. The identity of its contributors was merged in that of its editor, and those brilliant articles were never signed.
The spring of ninety-three, which found Jewdwine comfortably seated on the summit of his ambition, saw Rickman almost as obscure as in the spring of ninety-two. His poems had not yet appeared. Vaughan evidently regarded them as so many sensitive plants, and, fearing for them the boisterous seasons of autumn and spring, had kept them back till the coming May, when, as he expressed it, the market would be less crowded. This delay gave time to that erratic artist, Mordaunt Crawley, to complete the remarkable illustrations on which Vaughan relied chiefly for success. Vaughan had spared no expense, but naturally it was the artist and the printer, not the poet, whom he paid.
Rickman, however, had not thought of hisSaturnaliaas a source of revenue. It had been such a pleasure to write them that the wonder was he had not been called upon to pay for that. Happily for him he was by this time independent. As sub-editor and contributor toThe Museion, he was drawing two small but regular incomes. He could also count on a third (smaller and more uncertain) fromThe Planet, where from the moment of his capture by Jewdwine he had been reinstated.
He found it easy enough to work for both.The Planetwas poor, and it was out of sheer perversity that it indulged a disinterested passion for literature. In fact, Maddox and his men were trying to do with gaiety of heart what Jewdwine was doing with superb solemnity. But whenever Rickman mentioned Maddox to Jewdwine, Jewdwine would shrug his shoulders and say, "Maddox is not important"; and when he mentionedThe Museionto Maddox, Maddox would correct him with a laugh, "The Museum, you mean," and refer to his fellow-contributors as "a respectable collection of meiocene fossils." Maddox had conceived a jealous and violent admiration for Savage Keith Rickman. "Rickman," he said, "you shall not go over body and soul toThe Museion." He regarded himself as the keeper and lover of Rickman's soul, and would not have been sorry to bring about a divorce between it and Jewdwine. His irregular attentions were to save it from a suicidal devotion to a joyless consort. So that Rickman was torn between Maddox's enthusiasm for him and his own enthusiasm for Jewdwine.
That affection endured, being one with his impetuous and generous youth; while his genius, that thing alone and apart, escaped from Jewdwine. He knew that Jewdwine's incorruptibility left him nothing to expect in the way of approval and protection, and the knowledge did not greatly affect him. He preferred that his friend should remain incorruptible. That Jewdwine should greatly delight in hisSaturnaliawas more than he at any time expected. For there his muse, Modernity, had begun to turn her back resolutely on the masters and the models, to fling off the golden fetters of rhyme, gird up her draperies to her naked thighs, and step out with her great swinging stride on perilous paths of her own. To be sure there were other things which Jewdwine had not seen, on which he himself felt that he might rest a pretty secure claim to immortality.
Of his progress thither his friends had to accept Vaughan's announcements as the only intimation. Rickman had not called upon any of the Junior Journalists to smooth the way for him. He had not, in fact, called on any of them at all, but as April advanced he retreated more and more into a foolish privacy; and with the approaches of May he vanished. One night, however, some Junior Journalists caught him at the club, belated, eating supper. They afterwards recalled that he had then seemed to them possessed by a perfect demon of indiscretion; and when his book finally appeared on the first of May, it was felt that it could hardly have been produced under more unfavourable auspices. This reckless attitude was evidently unaffected (nobody had ever accused Rickman of affectation); and even Maddox pronounced it imprudent in the extreme. As for Jewdwine, it could not be accounted for by any motives known to him. His experience compelled him to take a somewhat cynical view of the literary character. Jewdwine among his authors was like a man insusceptible of passion, but aware of the fascinations that caused him to be pursued by the solicitations of the fair. He was flattered by the pursuit, but the pursuer inspired him with the liveliest contempt. It had not yet occurred to him that Rickman could have any delicacy in approaching him. Still less could he believe that Rickman could be indifferent to the fate of his book. His carelessness therefore did not strike him as entirely genuine. There could be no doubt however as to the genuineness of Rickman's surprise when he came upon Jewdwine in the office readingSaturnalia.
He smiled upon him, innocent and unconscious. "Ah!" he said, "so you're reading it? You won't like it."
Jewdwine crossed one leg over the other, and it was wonderful the amount of annoyance he managed to convey by the gesture. His face, too, wore a worried and uncertain look; so worried and so uncertain that Rickman was sorry for him. He felt he must make it easy for him.
"At any rate, you won't admire its personal appearance."
"I don't. What possessed you to give it to Vaughan?"
"Some devil, I think."
"You certainly might have done better."
"Perhaps. If I'd taken the trouble. But I didn't."
Jewdwine raised his eyebrows (whenever he did that Rickman thought of someone who used to raise her eyebrows too, but with a difference).
"You see, it was last year. I let things slide."
Jewdwine looked as if he didn't see. "If you had come to me, I think I could have helped you."
"I didn't want to bother you. I knew you wouldn't care for the things."
"Well, frankly, I don't care very much for some of them. But I should have stretched a point to keep you clear of Crawley. I'm sorry he put temptation in your way."
"He didn't. They say I put temptation in his way. Horrid, isn't it, to think there's something in me that appeals to his diseased imagination?"
"It's a pity. And I don't know what I can do for you. You see you've identified yourself with a school I particularly abominate. It isn't a school. A school implies a master and some attempt at discipline. It should have a formula. Crawley has none."
"Oh, I don't know about that." He stood beside Jewdwine, who was gazing at the frontispiece. "Talk about absolute beauty, any fool can show you the beauty of a beautiful thing, or the ugliness of an ugly one; but it takes a clever beast like Crawley to show you beauty in anything so absolutely repulsive as that woman's face. Look at it! He's got hold of something. He's caught the lurking fascination, the—the leer of life."
Jewdwine made a gesture of disgust.
"Of course, it's no good as an illustration. I don't see life with a leer on its face. But he can draw. Look at the fellow's line. Did you ever see anything like the purity of it? It's a high and holy abstraction. By Jove! He's gothisformula. Pure line remains pure, however bestial the object it describes. I wish he'd drawn it at illustratingme. But I suppose if he saw it that way he had to draw it that way."
Jewdwine turned over the pages gingerly, as if he feared to be polluted. He was at the moment profoundly sorry for Rickman in this marriage of his art with Mordaunt Crawley's. Whatever might be said of Rickman's radiant and impetuous genius it neither lurked nor leered; it was in no way represented by that strange and shameless figure, half Mænad, half modern courtesan, the face foreshortened, tilted back in the act of emptying a wine-cup.
"At any rate," said Rickman, "he hasn't lied. He's had the courage to be his filthy self."
"Still, the result isn't exactly a flattering portrait of your Muse."
"Sheisa caution. It's quite enough to make you and Hanson lump me with Letheby and that lot."
This touched Jewdwine in two sensitive places at once. He objected to being "lumped" with Hanson. He also felt that his generosity had been called in question. For a moment the truth that was in him looked out of his grave and earnest eyes.
"I donotlump you with Letheby or anybody. On the contrary, I think you stand by yourself. Quite one half of this book is great poetry."
"You really think that?"
"Yes," said Jewdwine solemnly; "I do think it. That's why I deplore the appearance of the other half. But if youhadto publish, why couldn't you bring out yourHelen in Leuce? It was far finer than anything you have here."
"Yes. Helen's all rightnow." His tone implied only too plainly that she was not all right when Jewdwine had approved of her.
"Now?What on earth have you been doing to her?"
"Only putting a little life into her limbs. But Vaughan wouldn't have her at any price."
"My dear Rickman, you should have come tome. I hope to goodness Vaughan won't tempt you into any moreSaturnalia."
"After all—what's wrong with them?"
Jewdwine leaned back, keenly alive to these stirrings of dissent; he withdrew, as it were, his protecting presence a foot or two farther. He spoke slowly and with emphasis.
"Excess," said he; "too much of everything. Too much force, too much fire, and too much smoke with your fire. In other words, too much temperament, too much Rickman."
"Too much Rickman?"
"Yes; far too much. It's nothing but a flaming orgy of individuality."
"And that's why it's all wrong?" He really wondered whether there might not be something in that view after all.
"It seems so to me. Look here, my dear fellow. Because a poet happens to have been drunk once or twice in his life it's no reason why he should write a poem calledIntoxication. That sort of exhibition, you know, is scandalous."
Rickman hung his head. That one poem he would have given anything at the moment to recall. Itwasscandalous if you came to think of it. Only in the joy of writing it he had not thought of it; that was all.
"It's simply astounding in a splendid scholar like you, Rickman. It's such an awful waste." He looked at him as he spoke, and his soul was in his eyes. It gave him a curious likeness to his cousin, and in that moment Rickman worshipped him. "Go back. Go back to your Virgil and your Homer and your Sophocles, and learn a little more restraint. There's nothing like them. They'll take you out of this ugly, weary, modern world where you and I, Rickman, had no business to be born."
"And yet," said Rickman, "therearemodern poets."
"There are very few, and those not the greatest. By modern, I mean inspired by the modern spirit; and the modern spirit does not inspire great poetry. The greatest have been obliged to go back—back to primeval nature, back to the Middle Ages, back to Greece and Rome—but always back."
"I can't go back," said Rickman. "I mayn't know what I'm working for yet, but I believe I'm on the right road. How can I go back?"
"Why not? Milton went back to the Creation, andhewas only born in the seventeenth century. You have had the unspeakable misfortune to be born in the nineteenth. You must live on your imagination—the world has nothing for you."
"I believe ithassomething for me, if I could only find it."
"Well, don't lose too much time in looking for it. Art's long and life's short, especially modern life; and that's the trouble."
Rickman shook his head. "No; that's not the trouble. It's the other way about. Life's infinite and art's one. And at first, you know, it's the infinity that staggers you." He flung himself into a chair opposite Jewdwine, planted his elbows on the table, and propped his chin on his hands. He looked as if he saw the infinity he spoke of. "I can't describe to you," he said, "what it is merely to be alive out there in the streets, on a sunny day, when the air's all fine watery gold, and goes dancing and singing into your head like dry champagne. I've given up alcohol. It isn't really necessary. I got as drunk as a lord the other day going over Hampstead Heath in a west wind" (helookeddrunk at the mere thought of it). "Does it ever affectyouin that way?"
Jewdwine smiled. The wind on Hampstead Heath had never affected him in that way.
"No. It isn't what you think. I used to go mad about women, just as I used to drink. I don't seem to care a rap about them now." But his eyes had a peculiar large and brilliant look, as if he saw the woman of his desire approaching him. His voice softened. "Don't you know when the world—all the divine maddening beauty of it—lies naked before your eyes, and you want to get hold of it—now—this minute, and instead it gets hold of you, and pulls you every way at once—don't you know? The thing's got a thousand faces, and two thousand arms, and ten thousand devils in it."
Jewdwine didn't know. How should he? He had a horror of this forcing of the sensuous and passionate note. The author of theProlegomena to Æstheticsrecoiled from "too much temperament." He felt, moreover, the jealous pang of the master who realizes that he has lost his hold. This was not that Rickman who used to hang all flushed and fervid on Jewdwine's words. He remembered how once on an April day, a year ago, the disciple had turned at the call of woman and of the world, the call of the Spring in his heart and in his urgent blood.
And yet this was not that Rickman either.
"My dear Rickman, I don't understand. Are you talking about the world? Or the flesh? Or the devils?"
"All of them, if you like. And you can throw in the sun and the moon and the stars, too. There are moments, Jewdwine, when I understand God. At any rate I know how he felt the very day before creation. His world's all raw chaos to me, and I've got to make my world out of it."
"I'm afraid I cannot help youthere."
As they parted he felt that perhaps he had failed to be sufficiently sympathetic. "I'll do my best," said he, "to set you right with the public."
Left alone, he stood staring earnestly at the chair where Rickman had sat propping his chin in his hands. He seemed to be contemplating his phantom; the phantom that had begun to haunt him.
What had he let himself in for?
There was one man who was sure, perfectly sure; and that man was Maddox. He had read Rickman's book before Jewdwine had seen it, and while Jewdwine was still shaking his head over it in the office of theThe Museion, its chances were being eagerly discussed in the office ofThe Planet. Maddox was disgusted with the publishers, Stables with the price, Rankin with the illustrations.
"It's all very well," said Rankin; "but those borrowed plumes will have to be paid for."
"Borrowed plumes with a vengeance," said Maddox. "Vaughan might just as well have turned him out tarred and feathered as illustrated by Mordaunt Crawley. Mind you, some of that tar will stick. It'll take him all his time to get it off."
"Did you see," said Stables, "that Hanson bracketed him with Letheby in this morning'sCourier?"
"No, did he?" said Maddox; "I'm sorry for that. It's rough on little Rickman."
"It's what you must expect," said Rankin, "if you're illustrated by Crawley."
"It's what you must expect," said Stables, "if you go out of your way to offend people who can help you. You know he refused an introduction to Hanson the other day?"
"No!"
"Fact. And it was in his sublimest manner. He said he hadn't any use for Hanson. Hanson couldn't help him till he'd helped himself. I don't know whether any one was kind enough to tell that tale to Hanson."
"Hanson," said Maddox, "is too big a man to mind it if they did."
"Anyhow, hehasn'thelped him."
"No," said Rankin; "but that's another story. Hanson was dining with Jewdwine, and Jewdwine was cracking up Rickman most extravagantly (for him). That was quite enough to make Hanson jump on him. He was bound to do it by way of asserting his independence."
"I wonder if Jewdwine calculated that that would be the natural effect."
"Oh, come, he's a subtle beast; but I don't suppose he's as subtle as all that."
"You'll find that all the reviews will follow Hanson like a flock of sheep."
"How about theLiterary Observer? Mackinnon was friendly."
Maddox smiled. "He was. But our Ricky-ticky alienated Mackinnon on the very eve of publication."
"How?"
"By some awful jest. Something about Mackinnon's head and the dome of the British Museum."
"Well, if it was a joke, Mackinnon wouldn't see it."
"No, but he'd feel it, which would be a great deal worse. Our Ricky-ticky is devoid of common prudence."
"Our Ricky-ticky is a d——d fool," said Stables.
"Well," said Rankin, "I suppose he knows what he's about. He's got Jewdwine at his back."
Maddox shrugged his enormous shoulders. "Jewdwine? Jewdwine won't slate his own man, but he can't very well turn round and boom the set he always goes for. This," said Maddox, "is my deal. I shall sail in and discover Ricky-ticky."
"He's taking precious good care to hide himself. It's a thousand pities he ever got in with those wretched decadents."
"He isn't in with them."
"Well, he mayn't be exactly immersed, but the tide's caught him."
"The tide? You might be talking of the Atlantic."
"The stream then—' the stream of tendency that makes for '—muck."
"It isn't a stream, it's a filthy duck-pond in somebody's back yard. There's just enough water for the rest to drown in, but it isn't deep enough to float a man of Rickman's size. He's only got his feet wet, and that won't hurt him."
"There are things," said Rankin, "in Saturnalia that lend themselves to Crawley's treatment."
"And there are things in it that Crawley can't touch. And look at the later poems—The Four Winds, On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of Confession. Good God! It makes my blood boil to compare the man who wrote that with Letheby. Letheby! I could wring Vaughan's neck and Hanson's too. I should like to take their heads and knock them together. As for Letheby I'll do for him. I'll smash him in one column, and I'll give Rickman his send-off in four."
(The Planet in those early days was liberal with its space.)
"After all," he added in a calmer tone, "he was right. We can't help him, except by taking a back seat and letting him speak for himself. I shall quote freely. The Song of Confession is the best answer to Hanson."
"It seems to me," said Stables, "you'll want a whole number at this rate."
"I shall want six columns, if I'm to do him any justice," said Maddox, rising. "Poor beggar, I expect he's a bit off colour. I shall go and look him up."
At eight that evening he went and looked him up. He found him in his room tranquilly reading. Thinking of him as a man of genius who had courted failure and madly fooled away his chances, and seeing him sitting there, so detached, and so unconscious, Maddox was profoundly moved. He had come with cursing and with consolation, with sympathy, with prophecy, with voluble belief. But all he could say was, "It's all right, Rickman. It's great, my son, it's great."
All the same he did not conceal his doubts as to the sort of reception Rickman had to expect. That part of the business, he said, had been grossly mismanaged, and it was Rickman's own fault.
"Look here," he said, "what on earth possessed you to go and refuse that introduction to Hanson? Was it just your cheek, or the devil's own pride, or what?"
"Neither," said Rickman, in a tone that pathetically intimated that he was worn out. "I think it was chiefly my desire for peace and quiet. I'm writing some more poems, you see. I wouldn't have refused it at any other time."
"At any other time it wouldn't have mattered so much. You should be civil to the people who can help you."
"I rather distrust that sort of civility myself. I've seen too much of the dirty back stairs of Fleet Street. I've tumbled over the miserable people who sit on them all day long, and I don't mean anybody to tumble over me. When I've got my best trousers on I want to keep them clean."
"It's a mistake," said Maddox, "to wear your best trousers every day."
"Perhaps. But I mean to wear them."
"Wear them by all means. But you must make up your mind for a certain amount of wear and tear. In your case it will probably be tear."
"That's my look-out."
"Quite so. I wouldn't say anything if it was only Hanson you'd offended, but you shouldn't alienate your friends."
"My friends?"
"Yes. Why, oh why, did you make that joke about Mackinnon's head?"
"We were all making jokes about Mackinnon's head."
"Yes; but we weren't all of us bringing out poems the next day. Your position, Ricky-ticky, was one of peculiar delicacy—and danger."
"What does it matter?" said Rickman wearily. "I can trust my friends to speak the truth about me."
"Heaven bless you, Rickman, and may your spring suitings last for ever." He added, as Jewdwine had added, "Anyhow, this friend will do his level best for you."
At which Rickman's demon returned again. "Don't crack me up too much, Maddy. You might do me harm."
But before midnight Maddox burst into the office and flung himself on to his desk.
"Give me room!" he cried; "I mean to spread myself, to roll, to wallow, to wanton, to volupt!"
Before morning he had poured out his soul, in four columns ofThe Planet, the exuberant, irrepressible soul of the Celt. He did it in an hour and twenty minutes. As he said himself afterwards (relating his marvellous achievement) he was sustained by one continuous inspiration; his passionate pen paused neither for punctuation nor for thought. The thoughts, he said, were there. As the critical notices only appeared weekly, to pause would have entailed a delay of seven days, and he meant that his panegyric should appear the very next day after the article in theLiterary Observer, as an answer to Hanson's damnable paragraph.
If Maddox was urged to these excesses by his contempt for Jewdwine's critical cowardice, Jewdwine was cooled by the spectacle of Maddox's intemperance. He had begun by feeling a little bitter towards Rickman on his own account. He was disappointed in him. Rickman had shown that he was indifferent to his opinion. That being so, Jewdwine might have been forgiven if he had had no very keen desire to help him. Still, hehaddesired to help him; but his desire had ceased after reading Maddox's review. There was no pleasure in helping him now, since he had allowed himself to be taken up and caressed so violently by other people. The clumsy hand of Maddox had brushed the first bloom from his Rickman, that once delightful youth. He was no longer Jewdwine's Rickman, his disciple, his discovery.
But though Jewdwine felt bitter, he was careful that no tinge of this personal feeling should appear in his review of Rickman's poems. It was exceedingly difficult for him to review them at all. He had to take an independent attitude, and most possible attitudes had been taken already. He could not ignore Rickman's deplorable connection with the Decadents; and yet he could not insist on it, for that was what Hanson and the rest had done. Rickman had got to stay there; he could not step in and pluck him out like a brand from the burning; for Maddox had just accomplished that heroic feat. He would say nothing that would lend countenance to the extravagance of Maddox. There was really no room for fresh appreciation anywhere. He could not give blame where Hanson had given it; and Maddox had plastered every line with praise. He would have been the first to praise Rickman, provided that hewasthe first. Not that Jewdwine ever committed himself. As a critic his surest resource had always lain in understatement. If the swan was a goose, Jewdwine had as good as said so. If the goose proved a swan, Jewdwine had implied as much by his magnificent reserve. But this time the middle course was imposed on him less by conviction than necessity. He had to hold the balance true between Hanson and Maddox.
In his efforts to hold it true, he became more than ever academic and judicial. So judicial, so impartial was he in his opinion, that he really seemed to have no opinion at all; to be merely summing up the evidence and leaving the verdict to the incorruptible jury. Every sentence sounded as though it had been passed through a refrigerator. Not a hint or a sign that he had ever recognized in Rickman the possibility of greatness.
Now, if Rickman had not been connected withThe Museion, the review would have done him neither harm nor good. As it was, it did him harm. It was naturally supposed that Jewdwine, so far from understating his admiration, had suppressed his bad opinion in the interests of friendship. Rickman'sSaturnaliaremained where Hanson had placed it, rather low in the ranks of young Decadence.
And then, just because he had suppressed the truth about him, because he felt that he had given Rickman some grounds for bitterness, Jewdwine began to feel more and more bitter himself.
If Rickman felt any bitterness he never showed it. He had only two thoughts on reading Jewdwine's articles. "It wouldn't have mattered except thatshewill see it"; and "I wouldn't have minded if it was what he really thought."
Maddox, rightly judging that Rickman would be suffering more in his affection than his vanity, called on him that afternoon and dragged him out for his usual Saturday walk. As if the thought of Jewdwine dominated their movements, they found themselves on the way to Hampstead. Maddox attempted consolation.
"It really doesn't matter much what Jewdwine says. These fellows come up from Oxford with wet towels round their heads to keep the metaphysics in. Jewdwine's muddled himself with the Absolute Beauty till he doesn't know a beautiful thing if you stick it under his nose."
"Possibly not; if you keep it farther off he might have a better chance. Trust him to know."
"Well, if he knows, he doesn't care."
"Oh, doesn't he. That's where Jewdwine's great. He cares for nothing else. He cares more than any man alive—in his heart."
"D—n his heart! I don't believe he has one."
"Would you oblige me by not talking about him any more?"
Maddox obliged him.
They tramped far into the country, returning at nightfall by the great road that crosses the high ground of the Heath. Rickman loved that road; for by night, or on a misty evening, it was possible to imagine some remote resemblance between it and the long straight ridge of Harcombe Hill.
They paused by common consent where the Heath drops suddenly from the edge of the road; opening out the view towards London. The hollow beneath them, filled by a thin fog, had become mysterious and immense.
"By the way," said Maddox, following an apparently irrelevant train of thought, "what has become of your friendship for Miss Poppy Grace?"
"It has gone," said Rickman, "where the old trousers go. Look there—"
Above them heaven seemed to hang low, bringing its stars nearer. A few clouds drifted across it, drenched in the blue of the night behind them, a grey-blue, watery and opaque. Below, sunk in a night greyer and deeper, were the lights of London. The ridge they stood on was like the rampart of another world hung between the stars which are the lights of poets, and the lights which are the stars of men. Under the stars Maddox chanted softly the last verses of theSong of Confessionthat Rickman had made.
"Oh, Ricky-ticky," he said, "you know everything. How did you know it?"
"Because I've been there."
"But—you didn't stay?"
"No—no. I didn't stay. I couldn't."
"I'm still there. And for the life of me I see no way out. It's like going round in the underground railway—a vicious circle. Since you're given to confession—own up. Don't you ever want to get back there?"
"Not yet. My way won't take me back if I only stick to it."
Under the stars he endeavoured to account for his extraordinary choosing of the way.
"I've three reasons for keeping straight. To begin with, I've got a conviction that I'll write something great if I don't go to the devil first. Then, there's Horace Jewdwine."
Maddox hardened his face; he had been told not to talk about Jewdwine, and he wasn't going to.
"If I go to the devil, he won't go with me. Say what you like, he's a saint compared with you and me. If he doesn't understand Songs of Confession, it's because he's never had anything to confess. The third reason—if I go to the devil—no, I can't tell you the third reason. It's also the reason why I wear my magnificent trousers. All the reasons amount to that. If I go to the devil I can't wear those trousers. Never, Maddox, believe me, never again."
Maddox smiled, and, unlike Maddox, he said one thing and thought another.
What he said was. "Your trousers, Ricky-ticky, are of too heavenly a pattern for this wicked world. They are such stuff as dreams are made of, and their little life—" he paused. What he thought was—"Your way, Ricky-ticky, is deuced hard for the likes of me. But I'll go with you as far as I can, my son."
Under the stars they looked into each other's faces and they knew themselves aright.
Jewdwine made up for the coldness of his published utterances by the fervour of his secret counsel. His advice to Rickman was, "Beware of the friendship of little men."
This Rickman understood to be a reflection on Maddox's position in the world of letters. He did not care a rap about Maddox's position; but there were moments when it was borne in upon him that Maddox was a bigger man even than Horace Jewdwine, that his reckless manner poorly disguised a deeper insight and a sounder judgement. His work onThe Planetproved it every day. And though for himself he could have desired a somewhat discreeter champion, he had the highest opinion of his friend's courage in standing up for him when there was absolutely nothing to be gained by it. He had every reason therefore to be attached to Maddox.
But it was true enough that he knew too many little men; men who were at home in that house of bondage from which he was for ever longing to escape; men whom he had met as he had described, sitting contentedly on the dirty back-stairs of Fleet Street; men who in rubbing shoulders with each other in that crowded thoroughfare had had to allow for a great deal of what Maddox called wear and tear. Those little men had remained invincibly, imperturbably friendly. They knew perfectly well that he thought them little men, and they delighted in their great man all the same, more than ever, in fact, since his new suit of morals provided them with a subject of eternal jest. For Maddox was but human, and he had found Rickman's phrase too pregnant with humour to be lost. They were sometimes very funny, those Junior Journalists, especially on a Saturday night. But Rickman was not interested in the unseemly obstacle race they dignified by the name of a career, and he did not care to mix too freely with young men so little concerned about removing the dirt and sweat of it. He clung to Maddox and Rankin as the strongest and the cleanest of them all. But even they had inspirations that left him cold, and they thought many things large and important that were too small for him to see. He would have died rather than let either of them know what he was doing now. He saw with dismay that they suspected him of doing something, that their suspicions excited them most horribly, that they were watching him; and he had told Maddox that what he desired most was peace and quietness.
He found it in the Secret Chamber of the Muse, where he shut himself up when his work with them was done. In there, his days and nights were as the days and nights of God. There he forecast the schemes of dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic. And as his genius foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist's vision of the world. This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden chain that bound Lucia's name to his whether she would or no. They recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification.
For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia's image was no longer one and indivisible. He had come to think of her as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh. One carried that garment a little more conspicuously than the other; it was by her beauty that she pierced him with the pain of longing; and not by her beauty only, but by the marks of suffering that in his memory still obscured it. She came before him, and her tragic eyes reproached him with the intolerable pathos of her fate, making him suffer too, through his exceeding pity. And yet his longing had not been consumed by pity, but had mingled with it as flame in flame. Long after he had parted from her, his senses ached as they recalled the exquisite movements of her body. He had only to shut his eyes, and he was aware of the little ripple of her shoulders and the delicate swaying of her hips. To lie awake in the dark was to see her kneeling at his side, to feel the fragrance of her thick braid of hair flattened and warmed by her sleep, and the light touch of her hands as they covered him. And before that memory his shame still burnt deeper than his desire.
But this Lucia had no desire for him and no pity. Her countenance, seen even in dreams, expressed a calm but immutable repugnance. No wonder, forshewas only acquainted with the pitiably inadequate sample of him introduced to her as Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He was aware that she belonged exclusively not only to Jewdwine's class, but to Jewdwine himself in some way (a way unspeakably disagreeable to contemplate). If he was not to think of her as enduring the abominations of poverty, he must think of her as married to Jewdwine. Married to Jewdwine, she would make an end of his friendship as she had made an end of his peace of mind. There had been moments, at the first, when he had felt a fierce and unforgiving rage against her for the annoyance that she caused him.
But now, dividing the host of turbulent and tormenting memories, there appeared a different Lucia, an invincible but intimate presence that brought with it a sense of deliverance and consolation. It was Lucia herself that saved him from Lucia. Her eyes were full of discernment and of an infinite tenderness and compassion. They kindled in him the desire that fulfils itself in its own utterance.
That this Lucia was not wholly the creature of his imagination he was assured by his memory of certain passages in his life at Harmouth, a memory that had all the vividness and insistence of the other. It was the Lucia he had known before the other Lucia, the Lucia who had divined and would divine him still. In a way she was more real than the other, more real than flesh and blood, even as that part of him by which he apprehended her was more real than the rest. From her he was not and could not be divided; they belonged to each other, and by no possibility could he think of this Lucia as married to Jewdwine, or of his friendship for Jewdwine as in anyway affected by her. He was hers by right of her perfect comprehension of him; for such comprehension was of the nature of possession. It was also an assurance of her forgiveness, if indeed she had anything to forgive. He had not wronged her; it was the other Lucia he had wronged. In all this he never once thought of her as his inspiration. She would not have desired him to think of her so, being both too humble and too proud to claim any part in the genius she divined. But she could not repudiate all connection with it, because it was in the moments when his genius was most dominant that he had this untroubled assurance of her presence.
And there in the Secret Chamber he bound her to him by an indestructible chain, the chain of the Nine and Twenty Sonnets.
The question was what should he do with it now that it was made? To dedicate twenty-nine sonnets to Lucia was one thing, to print them was another. If it was inevitable that he should thus reveal himself after the manner of poets, it was also inevitable that she should regard a public declaration as an insult rather than an honour. And he himself shrank from exposing so sacred a thing to the pollution and violence of publicity. Therefore he took each sonnet as it was written, and hid it in a drawer. But he was not without prescience of their ultimate value, and after all this method of disposal seemed to him somehow unsatisfactory. So he determined that he would leave the manuscript to Lucia in his will, to be afterwards dealt with as she judged best, whether she chose to publish or to burn. In the former case the proceeds might be regarded as partial payment of a debt.
And so two years passed and it was Spring again.