"Talent? Yes, decidedly, but too heterodox for us."
This was the general resume of the opinion of the publishing world that had determined to eject me and shut its door in my face. Had it been hinted that the rejection was on the ground of incapacity it would have been easier to bear, but, without exception, every declined manuscript had been accompanied with a warm commendation of the art that the critic chose to think was so misapplied. Often, walking up and down the length of that study with these letters of empty compliment crowding the mantelpiece, I felt like a captured tiger in a cage, being goaded and thrust at through the bars. And, together with this excessive longing of the brain to employ its power raged the useless, vehement desire for the woman, until in those moments of silent solitude, it seemed as if two living vultures were upon me, slowly tearing me asunder. As I walked away from Lucia this morning, and when I reached my own steps, I was conscious of a sense of physical illness; my head seemed light and dizzy, as when one gets up after long fever. I was so long opening the door that Nous, who had pushed his whole body close up against it, looked at me with surprise. As we went in I had one clear determination, and that was to apply once more to my father for help. He could, if he would, enable me to marry Lucia. Success must come with time. It was this time that would be transformed. This time, this daily life of waiting work, that hung upon me now like a wolf, with its fangs, gnawing my brain, would then, if I possessed her, pass by like a dove upon wings. After luncheon, when he was standing by the hearth, I thought, was a good time to approach the subject, and I came up to the other end of the mantelpiece.
"Don't you think you could," I said, striking a lucifer and lighting up a cigar, without the least wish to smoke at that moment, "manage to let Lucia and myself arrange something?"
He looked at me a little ironically.
"Have you heard that the firm have rescinded their decision, and are going to bring out the book after all?" he asked quietly.
I coloured with anger and annoyance at the sneer. "No," I answered, simply, "I have not."
"Then, my dear Victor, you know it is quite useless to re-open this old question. I have told you before, and I can only repeat it now, I am not going to make you an independent allowance, that you may marry your cousin and comfortably settle down into a do-nothing existence."
"I never propose such an existence," I answered calmly. "Have I ever led it? am I leading it now?"
"No, because just now you have every incentive to work, and you have all your energies turned in that one direction, but with a secured income, independence, and married to this girl, I know exactly what you would become, and if I can prevent it, I am not going to have my son a confirmed idler about town."
"I can't think how you can so misjudge me," I said. "If you would make me an allowance—say 300 Pounds Sterling a year—half the rent of this house we live in!" I added bitterly. "I should marry Lucia, but on that account I should not neglect the work. Incentive! I should have every inducement to work then as now!—if inducement were necessary—Which it is not. I work now, not because I am driven by motives and wishes, but because to write is as natural to me as to sleep or breathe!"
"Please remember you are talking to a sane Englishman," he answered coldly; "and if you want me to listen to you, you must talk sense."
"Very good," I said, bringing my teeth down nervously on the cigar. "Put it entirely on the ground of motive if you like; I should want to succeed then doubly, and success is only a thing of time. It will come one day to me, as it has come to others who have had the same difficulties at first."
My father smiled sceptically.
"We shall see. In any case, if you are so certain of success, you can't object to the fulfilment of your wishes resting on so sure a contingency!"
"That has nothing to do with it. I did not say how long success might not be deferred, and I am unwilling to wait in these circumstances."
"Ah!—delightful frankness!" he returned derisively, and I looked away from him into the fire.
It shot across me then, amongst my own worrying thoughts, how strange it is that one human being should have so little sympathy with another, that where one can, without the least annoyance to himself, confer all that another desires, there seems always some inexplicable impulse to withhold it. And I—if I had power to give, if I ever possessed money, it should be to give, give freely and without conditions to those who needed it.
Perhaps my father guessed what I was thinking of. At any rate, he recommenced the conversation by saying—
"You have had a great deal done for you, Victor, though you may consider yourself very ill-used. You had a most expensive education. Then you passed into the army—brilliantly, I admit, but you were aided in every possible way. Then you had a fancy to go to India. Well, I got your regiment changed, and you went. Six months after you write that you have determined to become an author. I assent to that, much against my judgment, and you send in your papers. Good. What have you done since then? Nothing but write things no one will print, and hang about your cousin!"
A dull anger lit up in all my veins, and sent the blood to my head at his words. Still, they were practically the truth, and I knew I had no right to resent them.
"Now," he continued, "I make you a reasonable and just proposal, and you know that it is so. I give you every opportunity to display your talent, if you have any, which I very seriously doubt. You have leisure and unlimited means at your disposal. I only stipulate that before I make you independent, and before you marry, you shall give some proof of your powers in literature. I don't say you must wait till you have acquired a fortune. Your first production that is accepted and acknowledged sets you free. When I see you are really on the way to a profession, I will take care your finances don't trouble you, and as to marriage, you can then, of course, do what you please. But as to assisting you now to hurry into an affair that I don't under any circumstances particularly approve of—No."
"Why don't you approve of it?" I said, with a faint smile; "if I were in love with a housemaid or a ballet dancer I could understand your objection, but a girl in our own rank, educated, pretty, clever—what more would you have?"
My father shrugged his shoulders and elevated his eyebrows, and finally answered—"I should have liked a little more sanity between you. Remember there is insanity on her side and insanity on yours, and you both of you seem half-cracky already, to my mind. Then you are cousins. The relationship is near, unpleasantly near. You are both very much alike, extremely excitable, and with both your heads stuffed full of nonsense. She is exceedingly delicate, and no wonder, sitting up all night sketching and sitting in all day painting! I wish you could have chosen some strong, sensible, matter-of-fact young woman!"
I smiled as I listened. The combination of those three adjectives fairly set my teeth on edge, and suddenly I seemed to see Lucia's pale brilliant face, with its dilated eyes and genius-lit pupils, swimming in the shaft of sunlight that fell between us on the rug.
"What the children of two such maniacs will be, I tremble to think of!" he said after a minute.
I laughed outright, flung my cigar end into the fire, and stretched myself.
"I don't think you need trouble about the children!" I said significantly.
His remark sounded so ludicrous to me that my answer came spontaneously, but it was the worst thing I could have said. My father's old-fashioned ideas were the rock upon which we invariably split. Otherwise we should have got on very well. But he was entirely of the school of yesterday, and I was entirely of the school of to-morrow. His forehead contracted violently, and he said curtly—
"Now, don't let me hear any of that ridiculous nonsense you were talking the other day! I won't have these sentiments expressed in my hearing!"
I laughed, and said nothing. I never wish to express sentiments in anybody's hearing that they don't want.
"Of course," he said, finally, after a long pause, "you can please yourself. If you like to try and find a situation as clerk or secretary or shoe-black, and marry this girl on the proceeds, do so. But if you do, you will get no help from me in future. Don't come to me then for funds to bring out your MSS. If you choose to disgrace your family and disappoint my expectations, consider yourself entirely cut off from me, that's all."
There was another stretch of silence, and then—
"Well, which is it to be, Victor? Lucia or Genius?"
"I really hardly know," I answered, lightly. "I want them both. I'll think it over."
And with Nous, who had sprung to his feet as I moved, closely following me, I crossed the dining-room and went out, upstairs to my own writing and sitting-room. Here I flung myself into an arm-chair and let my hand hang over the side and rest on the collie's neck. And as I curled absently the locks of fur round my fingers, the thought came—When would my hand play as familiarly with those short, glistening curls on Lucia's forehead? Of course, as far as that went, we were engaged, and I might have put our relations on a far more intimate and familiar footing than they were now. I might have kissed her, twisted and untwisted that great cable of hair, put my arm round her waist, and so on and so on. No one would have objected since we were fiances and, in addition, cousins. And it is difficult to define exactly the impulse that had prompted me to abstain from all of these things. Partly it was an impulse in her defence, and partly in my own. I felt that it was difficult enough, hard enough, to keep in perfect control my own passionate impulses when I was with her, even now, while there was the screen and shield between us of her abstracted calm; when there was a certain coldness and reserve around her; when there was no beginning, no opening, no invitation of demonstration; when her complete unconsciousness of herself helped me to restrain and conceal all my own feelings; but if this were dispelled; if she came to greet me with the bright conscious flush of passion; if I saw reflected in her eyes the fire that burnt in me; if I were permitted to take her into my arms and cheat myself for a single illusive instant with the thought that she was mine—what would it all mean? Only giving a sharper, more cutting edge to the bit in my mouth and rousing in her a hunger I could not satisfy. She was at present devoted to her art with a devotion that left her practically indifferent to everything else, and there was a thin frame of ice round her, which her abstraction and her ceaseless work built up; but I was convinced that the smouldering fire of a woman's nature lay underneath—that it was concealed never cheated me for an instant into the belief it was not existent. She was pure—perfectly, absolutely immaculate; but there was another power within and transfused throughout her innocence that swayed and subdued my will as innocence alone could never do. She reminded me of some exquisite, delicate porcelain flagon filled with sparkling wine, that sends its hot crimson glow through the snowy transparent tints of its circling walls. The wine within lies, at present, in glowing tranquillity, unshaken and unstirred, and the beauty and the purity of the flagon grows upon one as one looks. One would hesitate certainly to stretch an unclean hand to lift it, hesitate to touch it with lips that were not pure—but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us that that within is wine. And as the purity of a cup like this is different from that of a clean, thick, common china cup standing empty on the board, so was Lucia different from the ordinary virtuous English girl. And for her I would do and suffer much, and feel glad in it. I looked upon her as this vase, and since I had known her I had kept my hand clean, that one day I might take it without remorse. And in my treatment of herself I acted as I did because I saw that, as yet, her passions and her nature slumbered, just as the wine, unshaken, is steady within the cup.
Now, in my present helpless condition, to merely wake and rouse them, to distract and disturb her, and lift her out of her art, to draw her half from her own life, before I could take her wholly into my own, seemed a sacrilegious cruelty. And this was why, from the commencement of our engagement, I had said to myself—On this one condition only.
This was why, on the evening when I put the circlet of the engagement ring over the delicate finger, I had not touched the lips thanking me. I knew I could not kiss her coldly. These things depend upon one's nature. Some men shake hands listlessly. I cannot. If I take a friend's hand I grasp it warmly. How then, here, with those passive lips under mine, could I prevent them from drawing in the enthusiasm from my own? And this once done, I did not know how it might stir in her, and break up her life and turn her aside from the tranquil path of abstraction and occupation she was following now. I am not saying that, as a rule, a woman waits for her lover's kiss to arouse her. On the contrary, I am well aware that most women are uncommonly wide-awake from their thirteenth year, and it is a very old-fashioned and quite exploded idea to suppose that the springs of their nature lie dormant until one particular individual unlocks them. I am only saying that this girl was as yet entirely given over to her genius, and happy in it; and I loved her too well to weaken an impulse towards art which she could gratify, and create an impulse towards love which I could not for so long satisfy. So with all this in my brain, and with a guard upon myself that had never been relaxed since, I released her hand, with my ring upon it, as gently as I had taken it, and the quiver of nervous, painful excitement, that had shot through me as she laid it on my knee confirmed my resolution. Why teach her also, one moment before she need know it, the pain of self-repression?
"Is it not pretty," she had said.
"Which, the hand or the ring?"
"Why, the ring, of course," she had said, laughing. "You are too bad, Victor!"
"I don't know. I think the hand is decidedly the lovelier. But the ring is useful as a sign that now there is but one man in the world for you, as, Lucia, there is for me henceforth but one woman."
She had looked up suddenly, and her eyes had met mine with the passion kept out of them, and only reverence for her there. And even at that the fugitive scarlet had stained the pale skin, and the eyes had widened and darkened upon me, asking, Tell me, explain what this mysterious feeling is that seems stirring faintly in me? And I had looked back at her in silence, with a word unuttered, but still perhaps divined by her, on my lips.
Later!
And now things had come to a crisis. I felt as if I could not stand any longer, clear-headed and hard-working as I had been, against this repeated raising, then deferring, then breaking down of hope.
Constantly I had given rein to my thoughts and wishes; many times I had said, "This book will certainly be accepted, and then a month or a few weeks and she is my own."
But the book had not been taken, the weeks passed by and Lucia was as far from me as ever. And it could not continue. The perpetual excitation and reaction was slowly injuring and confusing the brain like a noxious drug administered to procure lunacy. And the temptation swept over me now to let go my hold on work, on this bitter effort to succeed, on this vain, useless striving for recognition, and sink into some humble position which would supply the necessities for a quiet obscure existence—shared with this woman. The weeks, months, years, passed now, wasted, in a dull torture, in a low fever, filled with long, dragging hopes, expectations, possibilities, and no realities. Better sweep all these away and settle into a level, solid existence, contented with the simple natural pleasures that life offers without striving for. Contented! I laughed as the word drifted across my brain. That was just what I felt I could not be in any life but the one I coveted—a life of power, recognition, distinction. Other men were. They married the women they loved, and dropped into quiet lives of daily work and regular incomes, and were content in them. Yes; but that was insufficient argument.
They had not within them the suffocating weight of a desire ungratified, the stifling sense of a power unused. Nature, who has appointed no greater joy for us than the exercise of the capacities she has given us, has also no heavier, bitterer burden she can lay upon us than these capacities barred down in us unemployed. As I thought, my father's words recurred to me, "A secretary, a clerk or a shoeblack." It was improbable I should descend to the shoeblack. It was possible that I could become a secretary or a clerk. A secretary or a clerk! The idea amused me. I leaned my elbows on my knees, my forehead on my hands, as I sat and stared down at the bear-skin rug at my feet and saw a vision of fifth-rate existence pass before me. A suburban villa or squalid London lodgings; the hurried early breakfast served by a slavey; the tram or bus to the city; the society of seedy clerks; the pipe instead of the cigar; the public billiard room instead of the club; the omnibus instead of the hansom; the fortnight up the Thames instead of the spring at Cairo. A day of uncongenial work—but at the end of it Lucia!
The thought seemed to come suddenly and stunningly through my brain like a bullet. The blood rushed to my face and I got up and crossed to the window, looking out and seeing nothing. Lucia daily, hourly, side by side with me in my life, and utterly my own possession! Yes, it was worth it! Worth all those petty considerations that had been passing before me, but there was another heavier than all the others massed together. My leisure would be taken from me. It would be impossible to write then as I was writing now. Now, I was absolutely my own master, and disposed of my time exactly as I pleased, and days passed constantly which were wholly spent in the preparation of a manuscript and when my train of thought was never interrupted. If all my days were given to monotonous business work, how then, and when, would the writing be accomplished? My evenings and nights would be my own—or Lucia's; and this line of reflection finished in an ironical laugh. I walked to and fro, one word hammering persistently on my brain-sacrifice. To accept a humble, working position, and in it to marry a woman as lovely, as vehemently desired, and as long waited for as Lucia, would mean the sacrifice of my talent. It would mean a suppression, a thrusting aside of work, and, to a certain extent, of thought. In such a life there would be so little place for it. Between the necessity of rejecting impersonal or imaginative thought to make room for the diurnal business routine, and the irresistible temptations to reject it at other times for present personal pleasure, it would be rarely accepted or welcomed, and its impetus would gradually weaken or lessen. Even as I thought of it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of all the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The rebellion of all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by the physical. What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental sinews to gratify the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental emotions to give reins to the physical? It would be the work of a fool. A rooting-up fruit trees to clear a space for weeds. And what of those twenty-six years of life that lay behind me? Did they count for nothing? Was all the repression and the hard work they contained to be flung aside now and wasted? Was the whole principle that had shaped them, of living in and for the intellect, to be utterly reversed now? And yet it was a wretched, poor, burdensome thing, life, as it had been lived by me. The past years stared me in the face mockingly. Clean, capable of being scrutinised in the sunlight, estimable from a moral and mental standpoint, but absolutely barren of pleasure, and, so far, barren of result. I looked at them with little satisfaction or pride. They were as immaculate, as bare, as denuded, as irritating, and as painful to contemplate as a chalk cliff. The character that is summed up in the line "video meliora proboque, detiora sequor" is supposed to be very common, and meets with universal comprehension and commiseration. Mine, perhaps, would find neither. I followed the good—that is, good as the world's opinion goes—the straight line in life, without any of the enthusiasm for virtue to form a consolation and support. I looked upon vice without that repulsion that makes resistance to it easy, pleasant, involuntary almost. I felt no sense of strong condemnation of those acts or failings or lapses in others which I studiously avoided myself. Therefore, I had neither the pleasure that might be derived from the evil itself, nor the warm satisfaction and personal pride that comes from conscious superiority to one's neighbours. I had lived the life of a Puritan, but I had neither the heart nor brain of one. None of the rigid bigotry, none of the exultant delight in morality, none of the merciless joy in trampling upon pleasure which gives him his reward. I looked round upon life and its many devious ways with eyes listless and indifferent to its vice and sympathetic to its pleasure, and back upon my own straight path with something of regret that my self-respect had been strong enough to hold me to it. And now the temptation came to sacrifice all that I had clung to. To abolish the thought and remembrance of my talent, muffle and stifle the powers of the brain, and remember only that I had the pulses and senses and blood of a man. It came over me slowly, this phase of rebellious animalism, like a mantle falling over me. Thought followed thought insidiously, imperceptibly, like fold upon fold of a cloth dropped upon me, as I sat in the silent room alone. To take this girl and force back her art upon itself, to mutilate her brain-power and drug it with her roused sensuality, to turn her into a simple instrument of pleasure for myself, and lend myself to her as such. To yield to this inflowing tide of desire that beat, now, heavily through all my veins, and let the brain go down beneath its waves.
If I chose I could do it, and none but myself could gauge the depth of my debasement. No eye could discern the high level ground now on which I stood and the morass that swam before me. I should marry this girl and the world asks no more. This other lower life that lay in my power appealed to me in all its sweetness—this woman as she would be when mine. Those lips with the mark of mine upon them; those delicate nerves stung to frenzy; that form tense, and the limbs strung with passion; those eyes terror-stricken between anguish and ecstasy.
The thought of the woman's personality clung to me like a viscous web. I struggled against it, but it enwrapped me; I could not shake it from me.
Again and again my arm encircled those soft yielding shoulders; the warm agitated bosom was touching mine; my hands held, and felt within it, the smooth muscles of the white arm—a vision of the whole indefinably supple form swam giddily before me in a suffocating proximity, till I pressed my hands on my eyes, and the thought came involuntarily,—Is this insanity?
My brain gave her into my arms now as I sat there, and the blind physical system clamoured in agony, Where is she? An hour passed, and then I got up and laughed. The destructive wave of emotion had risen in me, rolled through me and gone by. The struggle was over, and I lived again but to work. I stood on the rug rolling a cigarette, and lighted it leisurely, trying to recall a respectable calm, and when I had fairly succeeded I went out and downstairs. I came into the dining-room and found my father still there, looking through a budget of political pamphlets that had just come in by the post.
He looked up, and I met his eyes with a laugh.
"I have decided not to look out for a vacancy in the shoeblack line," I said; "but to go on—up the hill. Is there any claret or water or soda about—I don't much care what it is?"
"There is claret and soda too—there on the cheffonier. What a pity it is, Victor, you are so unreasonable! You make yourself look deplorably ill about every trifle! You are certainly trying to find a short cut out of the world! Why don't you take things more easily?"
"I am as I am," I muttered. "I'm going out now," I said, when I had finished the soda.
"I'm going to look Howard up. I have got a new plan of work if he'll join me in it. I shall see."
My father elevated his shoulders as much as to say, Some new phase of dementia, I suppose, and I went out.
I took the underground to Baker Street, and thence two minutes' walk brought me to the house I wanted. Howard was a friend of mine, an intimate friend, though, strictly speaking, from his character he ought not to have been.
As a general rule I steer clear of friendships with men who are very much opposed to me in character; it saves a lot of bother in the end. However, in this case, although I believed Howard to be a weak, worthless, untrustworthy individual, I could not help liking him. He was talented and of a pleasing—at least to me—personality. When I came into his room he was sitting reading in a long chair by the fire.
"Oh! is that you, Vic? Come in," he said, turning a good-looking discontented face towards me, not improved just now by the effects of a severe attack of jaundice.
"How are you?" I said, shaking his saffron-hued hand.
"Pretty beastly. And you?"
"Your remark might serve, I think," I said, taking a chair opposite him.
"Aren't you any better?" and I scanned his face closely.
He was not more than twenty, and had a singularly fine type of countenance.
"Oh yes, thanks! Crawling on."
"Any news?"
"None, I think, except that I've broken with Kitty."
I laughed.
"I knew you'd have to!" I said. "Did I not say so from the first? I felt sure you could never stand her!"
"I am rather sorry, for she was very pretty; but the last straw she put upon me was too much. I couldn't—after that—no, I couldn't, really."
"What was it?" I said, laughing, as he shook his head dubiously and looked meditatively into the fire.
"Why, I sent her a sonnet—at least, no, a verse—and we were talking about it afterwards, I had written—"
'And leaning sideways, looks, and liftsThe tresses of her heavy hair.'
"See?"
I nodded.
"Well, she objected to the adjective 'heavy,' and wanted me to insert another. What word do you think she suggested?"
"Can't say at all. Golden, perhaps!"
"Worse!" he answered, with a groan. "Golden is hackneyed but still conceivable. No—Crimpy! my dear fellow! Think of it!"
I went into a fit of laughter.
"Heavens! well I must say I never should have thought of that," I said. "What a fearful girl. And what did you say?"
"Say! I tried to explain to her the awfulness of it, the incongruity, but no, she couldn't see it! We jawed about it for a couple of hours with the result that our engagement is now off!"
"Good. I am very glad to hear it; but perhaps a Breach of Promise will come on?"
"Can't help it. Anything would be better than to go through life with a girl who didn't feel there are some things no fellar can do; and one of them, that he can't put a word like crimpy in his sonnet."
"Been doing any work?"
"Yes; one poem. Like to see it?"
"Very much."
He got up and went to a table littered all over with papers—written, printed, and blank. After a time he extracted the one he wanted, handed it to me, and then flung himself into the chair again.
"Whew! This title won't do. 'The Hermaphrodite!' That's far too alarming for the British public."
"Oh, bother! Well, go on. Read the poem."
I did so in silence.
"First-rate," I said, when I had finished. "Not a weak line in it. Not a single weak line. And there's nothing to prevent its being taken even in this d——d England, I think. The title's the worst part. You'll have to alter that."
"Why? Swinburne has a poem, 'Hermaphroditus.'"
"Yes—in a volume; and there it's Latinised; and then Swinburne has made his name, which of course is everything. If you want to make your debut before the English reading world you must do so with 'Ode to my father's tombstone,' or something of that sort!"
"Well, if you think Latin would improve it, let's put 'Duplexus' as its title," he answered, laughing and trying to snatch back the paper.
"Not on any account!" I said. "That would sound cynical, and cynical when you're unknown you must not be."
"Oh, well, there! I leave it to you to find a title! I don't care what it's called."
I looked through the verses trying to catch an idea for a name. Numbers suggested themselves to me, but none sufficiently vague and indefinite to suit the English ear. At last I said—
"Do you think Linked Spheres would do?"
"Linked Spheres?" replied Howard, with elevated brows. "What on earth has that to do with the subject?"
"Well, I have taken it from this line where you say, 'And in his brain are two divided worlds of thought.'"
"But I say that they are divided—divided isn't linked!"
"No, I quite admit it. But though divided they must be linked to a certain extent by being both within his brain. It is not quite right though, because the walls of the skull might, by encircling the two worlds, be said to unite them, but they could not 'link' anything. I follow all that, and I don't think the title is particularly artistic. It's not clear enough. Your own is much better from the view of intrinsic fitness. But the beauty of Linked Spheres is its indistinctness. You must not be too clear. That has been my great fault—perspicuity—and I am beginning to see it now. It has fatally barred my getting on. I always do try to make people see exactly what I mean, and that is apparently a mistake. When I write about passion everybody feels it is passion, and is shocked in consequence. When another fellow writes about it you feel he is trying to say something, but you are not quite sure what, and so it doesn't matter."
"'Muddle it! muddle it!' must be your watchword if you want to pass muster through the British press. Linked Spheres is a splendid muddle—very indefinite, quite void of connection with the subject in hand, and with a pleasant tinkle about the sound, just like Gladstone's speeches! Linked Spheres! It's impossible, for how the deuce would you link a sphere? Metaphor all wrong, and no one will know in the least what you mean, but it sounds pleasant and polished, and perfectly proper, and you'll find your editor will swallow the poem at a gulp."
Howard laughed.
"You're in an awful huff, Victor, with the British press, that's clear!"
I laughed too.
"Yes I am, I admit it, and all this leads up to the question I came to ask you this afternoon. Will you come over to Paris with me? I am going."
I got up and leant against the mantel-piece, pushing a place clear for my elbow on it between a bottle of liqueur and a copy of "The Holy Grail."
"You're great at springing mines upon one. Paris? why Paris? And how can you tear yourself away from Lucia?"
"I wish you would not pronounce that word as if it rhymed with Fuchsia," I said.
"Well, how do you want me to pronounce it?"
"You know quite well its Lu-chee-ah, and the accent is on the middle syllable, not the first."
"Oh, all right: Lu-CHEE-ah. Ah! what a mouthful! I would rather say Miss Grant!"
"It might be as well if you did," I said, coldly.
Howard looked at me and opened his eyes.
"You are uncommonly sticky to-day," he said, kicking a very old slipper off his swinging foot and catching it on the toe again.
"Well, what about Paris? Let's hear."
"I am so sick of this rotten, wishy-washy England. They won't take my things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick dipped in ink. It must never become what mine is—a painter's brush, wet, dripping, overflowing with oil colour. It struck me you might care to come too, and do the same with your verse. If so—come, by all means."
I looked down at his intelligent face and hoped he would come. Selfish, conceited, and self-sufficient as I may be, there is a strand of weakness made up in my composition that forces me to find the companionship of another intellect whenever possible.
"Yes; I'll come," he answered after a minute, getting on to his feet and thrusting both hands into his pockets with an energetic air. "I'm rather dubious about the books and the translation business; but anyway we can have a high old time in Paris!"
"But look here, Howard," I returned, "whether I succeed or not, I am not meditating having any high old time, or rather what you mean—a low old time. I'm going there to work."
"Oh, we all know you're a saint!" he said derisively. "But—'A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas!' We shall see how long your virtue lasts at La Scala and in the Champs Elysees, with Lucia safely packed away in England!"
I smiled and raised my eyebrows in silence. The point was not worth discussing. Howard and I looked at some things from such an enormously different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole psychological system—self-control and self-respect—were entirely absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of utility, at his every bad one from the point of secrecy. He would do the first if it were useful to him, and the last if it were secret. These, I believe, were the only two conditions that ever occurred to him. He was weak, even contemptible, in character, and I could not help clearly seeing it, but my friendship to him was won over by his talents, and by a certain good-tempered, easy, pleasant way he had. Widely different though we were, we had never had a quarrel. We got on together perfectly, and he might say things to me that would have offended me from an other man. Liking! Liking! What is it? It is as difficult to define, as impossible to imprison between the limits of motives and reasons, of "Whys" and "becauses," as Loving. I liked Howard, or rather I liked his society, which is not the same thing. Often the people who are the most disappointing in the great issues of life are the pleasantest to live with through the trifles of everyday existence and vice versa. I would not have trusted Howard in a crisis for any consideration, but then crises don't come every day, and he was delightful to discuss a chapter or a sonnet with.
"When are you going, by the way? Not to-morrow, I hope, for behold this room!" and he glanced round helplessly.
It was certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Masses of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers occupied the chairs.
"No, next week. Shall we say Saturday?"
"All right. I'll be ready by then. Cross—evening, I suppose?"
"Very likely. But I shall see you again," I said, looking at my watch. "By Jove! close to seven. I must go. Try and get rid of that confounded jaundice. Good-bye!"
Howard extended his hand.
"By the way, what about the tin? Can you manage?"—
"Oh yes! That's all right," I said.
I was Howard's bank, upon which he drew fitfully and spasmodically: that is to say, when any expensive little fancy seized him. He always insisted on giving me I.O.U.'s and acknowledgments for the sums he borrowed, which I as regularly tore in pieces and put in the fire. I was half way down the stairs when I ran back and opened his door again.
"Howard!"
"Hullo!"
"Have you a copy of that verse? I have not half studied it this evening."
"What?" he said, looking round his chair back. "Your precious Linked Spheres? Yes; take that one if you like."
I took up the paper.
"Thanks!" I said, and re-descended the stairs.
Going down Baker Street, I stopped at the first lamp-post, and read some lines of it again. A glow of admiration, almost of affection, towards the curious lines, full of nascent genius, lit slowly in me.
"Splendid! magnificent!" I muttered. "If not here, I'll see it's got out in Paris."
The next week saw myself and Howard installed in Paris. We had two large, comfortable rooms on the second floor, opening into each other, well furnished and upholstered in every way as sitting-rooms, as most of the French bedrooms are.
They faced a corner where several boulevards met and diverged, and there was a constant stream of Paris life flowing beneath our windows every hour of the day. A balcony ran outside, and on this in the evening we used to stand and smoke and flick paper balls on to the heads of the grisettes and the bonnes passing far underneath. On the ground floor of the hotel was a cafe that extended also over the pavement with its chairs and tables, and was open to the general public as well as to those who were staying in the hotel.
Howard and I got on admirably as usual. Although we were so different we had the common ground of a similarity in intellect. On all strictly intellectual subjects, in psychological discussions, on points of artistic merit, we seldom differed. His brain was, when he chose to exert it, singularly brilliant, and in a companion this compensates me for everything else almost that is wanting. I could not certainly have lived in the same intimacy with a fool who had been as high principled, as moral, and as sober as Howard was the reverse of all these. Our mode of life was very different, as naturally it would be, since I had come with a predetermination to do nothing but work, and he with an equally strong one to idle his days away in the most enjoyable manner he could invent. For myself, I was fairly content with the prospect before me. Work I was accustomed to, and it was easy. A new idea for a manuscript had begun to hover fitfully before my mental vision, and was gradually absorbing my thoughts into itself. Had I been able to write to and hear from Lucia I should have been satisfied, but my father had made the absence of all correspondence between us a sine qua non of my coming here. When I had heard this I had looked at him with some little amusement. Such a stipulation as this seemed to me to have only one interpretation—he hoped and thought I should forget her!
"What is the meaning of this?" I asked. "What can be the benefit of it? How can the fact of our writing or not writing be of importance? Do you think I shall ever relinquish Lucia? I am resigned to wait as long as must be, but I am utterly determined to have her in the end."
To which my father had answered grimly with a smile,—
"Very well, my dear Victor, see that you get her!"
Which remark had made me grind my teeth and then laugh and shrug my shoulders.
"And you won't permit a letter a month?"
"No."
"Oh, dressed in your little brief authority!" I thought, looking at him. Then I said—
"Very good—I agree."
"I consider I have your word that you will not write, nor hear from her, directly or indirectly, within this year?"
"Certainly you have."
And so the matter was settled.
When Lucia heard of it, we met each other's eyes, and she elevated her eyebrows, and a faint smile curved her lips.
"It will make no difference," she murmured, and nothing more.
After all, I don't know that I cared very greatly about the letters. It was Lucia herself that I wanted—nothing less. It gives me very little pleasure to read a letter, and I never have understood the cherishing locks of hair and dead roses business.
The desire for the presence of the living personality is too sharp-edged to let me feel satisfaction in substitutory objects and vague associations. To have put my hand round Lucia's living throat; yes, that would have been a keen delight, but I was not dead set on possessing myself of her handkerchief that I might kiss in private. I had one portrait of her—that was all—and that I rarely looked at.
The first thing I did in Paris was to find a translator for Howard's poem, which, after a time, appeared in one of the literary papers in its French dress, and returned to its original title. He came to me suddenly one evening with a contemporary paper in his hand, and the flush of gratified talent, and the pride that is its first cousin, kindling in his face.
"Look here, Vic!" he said; "isn't this first-class? Here's a critique on my verses, and just see how they crack them up!"
I took the paper and read the paragraph, Howard leaning over my shoulder and resting his knee on the arm of my chair. When I had finished I looked up at him.
"Not a word more than it deserves, old man!" I said. "Now you realise, don't you, what you can be and do if you choose!"
"Yes. Well, really, if all that's true, I ought to make some sort of a name some day, eh?"
And for a time it seemed that a lasting impression had been made upon him. He seemed to feel that elation and enthusiasm stir in him which makes it a joy to the genius to renounce all for his work. With regard to my own manuscripts, I sent some of them, in English, to one of the French publishing firms, and there ensued a blank of three weeks. At the end of that time I received a peremptory note inviting me to call at their office. When I presented myself I was shown into a bare, square room, where an august little man was standing, using a silver toothpick. He was short, with a large-sized lower chest; bald, with a short, grey beard cut to a sharp point; waxed moustache ends, sticking out ferociously; and brown eyes, keen with intelligence. He bowed elaborately.
I could speak French, he supposed.
I assented, and the conversation then went on very fast.
Monsieur's works had been read by their Anglo-French reader and highly approved. There was no doubt that Monsieur possessed a talent, a talent that he would say was—colossal. At the same time, these works were all too English in tone to catch the taste of the Parisian world, and Monsieur had seemed to put a restraint upon his pen, that rendered his works a touch too cold.
Great heavens! how I raised my eyebrows at that; remembering that in England I had been always rejected on account of being too warm.
Now, his proposition was this:—If Monsieur felt disposed to write a manuscript, in which the scene should be laid in France, and some of the characters, at least, be French, and also allow himself a little greater latitude, then he should be delighted to put the manuscript in the hands of their very best translator, and give it out to an audience that, above all things, admired vigour.
I heard all this with satisfaction. The offer meant a lot more work for me, but I did not mind that, with success—dear success—in view. I closed with his proposition at once, and after some formalities and details had been gone into and settled, I rushed home to tell Howard.
So, for a time, settled into working intellectual grooves, our life ran on quietly from day to day with a fair prospect on ahead of us.
And then came an unlucky incident which jerked the wheels of Howard's existence out of the narrow, hard line of effort, and after that they ran along anyhow, sometimes on and sometimes off it, and kept me in dread of a total smash. The Champs Elysees were full of the late afternoon sunlight, and we sauntered slowly, criticising the occupants of the various carriages rolling up to the great arch of Napoleon, and arguing in a broken, desultory way on our usual subject of talk—literature.
Howard was on the outside, nearest the road, walking on the actual kerb, and flicking up the leaves in the gutter, as he talked, with the point of his cane. As we strolled, with our eyes more or less directed on the string of vehicles moving in the centre of the sunny road, we noticed one small, black brougham going the same way as ourselves, that seemed conspicuous by being closed amongst the rest of the open victorias. Suddenly it detached itself from the line of other carriages and dashed up alongside of the pavement where we were walking. Its wheels ground in the gutter, and I caught Howard's arm to draw him more on to the pavement.
"Look out!" I exclaimed. "What a way to drive!" I added, as the coachman whipped up his horses and drove on some fifty yards, close to the kerb. There he pulled up abruptly. The door of the brougham was pushed open and a woman got out. Such a figure it was that outlined itself in the sunny light, standing on the white trottoir, and with the vista of the Champs Elysees behind it—a form seductive in every line, with a fine hip, and a tiny arched foot that tapped the pavement impatiently.
"What's up?" I said to Howard. "Whom is she waiting for, I wonder?"
A few steps more brought us up to her, and then, to our astonishment, she turned fully towards me, and said in her own language,—
"Will you come and dine with me this evening, Monsieur? The carriage will take us home now!"
We both stopped short. There was a second of blank amaze, and the woman's face stamped itself on our startled vision;—the eyes, liquid and gleaming, behind a veil of black lashes; the smooth firm nose, with its raised and tremulous nostril; the oval of either cheek, with the damask glow in it; and the curled mouth of deepest crimson, with the essence of sensuous languor in its curve.
For a second we stared at it in the sunlight, and that second sufficed to let us take in the situation; and there was something in her words and tone of confidence, and something of authority in the way she pointed to her carriage, that annoyed me.
"Thank you! I only dine with my friends," I answered coldly.
I suppose she was not insensible to the contempt in my tone and eyes as I looked down on her, for her next words came in a more humble, ingratiating voice.
"Make me one of them, then, Monsieur!—at once;" and she smiled—a lovely smile on such a mouth. Howard stood in silence, staring at her. I was very much amused and a little annoyed.
"You flatter me!" I returned, satirically; "but I have as many as I want already."
Howard broke in.
"Won't you extend your invitation to me?" he said, eagerly, and she threw a quick side-glance over him.
"I can't invite you both—at the same time!" she said, with a laugh and a little Parisian shrug; and then she looked at me again with a look that one would say was abominable or charming, according as one's particular mood at the moment was.
My mood was not such as to condemn it.
My next words were simply said for me, as it were, by my long habit of self-restraint.
"My presence is not in the question at all, to embarrass you," I said, curtly, and added to Howard—
"We may as well go on."
But that was not at all his view.
"Ask me," he said, with his shaky French accent; "I'll come!" and he put his hand on her arm, with a glance that matched her own. She seemed pretty well indifferent which of us it should be, and she merely said imperiously,—
"Come, then!" and with a grimace over her shoulder at me, disappeared into her brougham again.
Howard would have followed instantly, but I seized his arm.
"What are you doing?" I said in English. "Is it worth it, Howard? You may regret it. She is probably some married woman!"
Howard wrenched himself free from me.
"Don't talk to me! I'm not the fellow to refuse a jolly good lark when it's offered to me!"
He flung himself into the brougham without another word, drew the door to after him, and they were gone, whirling up the Champs Elysees, leaving me standing on the kerb looking after the polished black back of the brougham receding and growing small in the distance.
"Well!" I thought, "if another fellow had told me this tale, I should have thought it a howler!"
The suddenness of the whole thing had taken my breath away, and I must have stood there many seconds in confused thought, in which a flexible form and arched foot took a prominent part.
When I roused myself I saw Nous was lying down beside me with the patience of a philosopher, and catching the flies that buzzed along the sunny pavement—to kill time.
I called him, and went on up toward the Arc.
"I couldn't have done otherwise," I thought. I knew I did not wish to have done otherwise. I knew I should say again exactly the same if the brougham were again before me, but yet—
"I want nothing now that I have my work on hand," I told myself, as the arched foot went on before me up the pavement.
"By-and-by"—but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.
I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to work.
Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was sitting after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe, smoking, under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a fiacre drew up at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see me for a minute, engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a pourboire, and then he was just going straight across the lighted trottoir into the hotel when I called to him.
"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see you under the tree."
He came back and drew up a chair, with a scraping sound, to the opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his hat back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to where we were sitting, from the windows and open glass doors of the cafe. He looked well and uncommonly jolly; a man who lives his life, such as it is, without thought, without reflection, and without philosophy—who views the passing hour without grudging, the past without regret.
"You look awfully seedy," he said. "Anything up?"
"No," I answered. "Well? 'How have we sped in this contest?' How went the dinner?"
"I'll tell you," he said, turning round to secure a passing garcon. "Let's get hold of a drink first. Oh, she's got a jolly place!" he said, when the garcon, and eventually the drink, had been captured. "Nice house and all that. She's married, as you said, and of very good family. Received everywhere, you know."
"Husband at the dinner?" I asked laconically.
"No; husband gone to Tunis on business."
"Expected back to-day, I suppose?"
"No, to-morrow."
"Pity."
"Yes. You should have gone, Vic! She'd have satisfied you! Lovely figure! I never knew a lovelier!"
I said nothing.
"What did you think of her stopping us like that?" he went on after a minute.
"I thought it consummate cheek," I said. "I should not have believed it if it hadn't actually happened before my eyes."
"Yes, it was cheeky; but do you know, she is not very cheeky, really. An awfully nice woman, and very clever. But aren't these Parisiennes queer? You can't imagine any woman doing such a thing in England, can you?"
"Hardly."
"It seems she had seen us once before. It was you she wanted, not me. Why didn't you go, you duffer? I only came in a bad second!"
I laughed.
"She had read my things and likes them. Do you know, I think it is rather a good thing I have met her, it will urge me to do more—don't look at me 'in that tone of voice,' I am sure it will, really, Victor!"
"Are you going to see her again, then?" I asked.
"Yes, oh yes!"
"When the husband next visits Tunis, I suppose?"
"Yes, and before that, even when he's here. She is going to patronise my talent—see?"
"I see."
"I must write my next thing to her, of course. It's a nuisance being hampered with this beastly French language!"
And then the conversation went on. We sat there and talked and argued from the particular to the general, and back again, until the waiters came and cleared the chairs off the pavement and began to turn out the lights in the cafe—and it was a conversation after which I slept badly.
After this incident I saw less of Howard, and our lives ran farther and farther apart. I grew more and more absorbed in the developing manuscript. He grew more and more taken up in the stream of amusement he had entered. He wrote very little. A couple of lines that had occurred to him perhaps at the theatre, and were jotted hastily on the edge of a programme, was all that a whole week produced. And even these would have been lost through his carelessness but for me.
The days were generally divided between headache and sleep; the nights between the theatre and drink. I regretted it; and this life that was being wasted, poured out in uselessness, within my sight oppressed me. I should hardly have noticed it with another man, but I knew that this one had been planned for higher things.
I used to try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by drink, had almost forgotten.
"Are they not splendid?" I would say; "and you are the author! You are their parent, Howard! Think! Any man could lead the life you are leading! not one in a thousand could produce these lines!"
Howard would look at me suspiciously with heavy eyes.
"Are you sure I wrote that? I don't think I remember it!"
What a crime!
"I know you did," I would answer, and then urge him to give every day and night in the week, if he liked, to pleasure except one—"let one be sacred to work!"
"And just think," he would answer, lazily, "if I were dying, how those days and nights wasted would come and stare me in the face!"
"Wasted! in the building of such lines as these?"
"But what's the good of them when they are built? They don't make me enjoy life!"
And he pursued his own path and I could not stop him. I hoped and thought he would get tired after a time of the Paris halls and drunken nights and sick headaches, but I waited in vain. He had gradually got intimate with the back as well as the front of the scenes, and this I liked less than anything. The state of Howard's finances, too, threw an extra weight of responsibility on me, for he must have trodden a straighter road, and perhaps he would have worked more if he had had less money. And the money—his superfluous cash—came generally from me. His own allowance was small; just enough to keep him and no more. Gifts, under the name of loans, from me supplied all extras, and filled all deficiencies and gaps. What could I answer when he used to say, "Dear old boy! let me have another twenty!" And yet I knew it was handing him the razor to cut his throat. I hoped the sight of another fellow working as persistently as I did would have been an encouragement to him to make some sort of effort himself, but he looked upon me as a misguided creature, and took pains not to follow my example.
"How do you know that you will ever marry Lucia? or make a success of your books or anything?" he asked me one evening as we went upstairs after dinner, he to dress before going to La Scarletta, I to work on the MS.
"You are working for an uncertainty, a dream. It may never come off, and then where will you be. Now, at least, I know what I am going to have this evening. Such enjoyment as there is I get it, and there's an end of it, and no worry about it. As for you, you are all worry; and even granted that you get, in the end, something superlatively satisfactory, why, it will hardly make up to you for all you have gone through to get it!"
I said nothing. We had got up to our rooms by this time, and I flung myself into the easy chair.
Howard went into his room and brought back his dress shoes to put them on in mine, that he might follow up his argument.
"Now, look here, Vic, which of us two fellows is the most ready to go out of the world? In the Bible or prayer-book or somewhere we are told to live so that we may be willing and prepared to die any minute. Well, that's just what I do. I haven't a scrap of a tie to life. I don't think there will be anything better in it than what I have had already. I'd go to-morrow. But you, you would not like it a bit, and you can't deny it. You have got all the ties of your unsatisfied desires. You want to get Lucia—you want to make your name. You would be awfully cut up now if you were told you were going to be bundled out of life in ten minutes; and I—I shouldn't care!"
Howard had finished fastening his patent shoes, and now sat back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, and his hands behind his head.
"Being brought into life is just like being invited to a feast from which you may be called away at any minute. Well, if you have eaten and drunk to satiety you will be only too glad to get up and go away and sleep. But if you have sat at the table, hungering all the time and repressing yourself, then, when the sudden call comes, and you must rise and leave it for ever, think what a misery and bitterness to be dragged away from the brilliant table, with all its dishes and its wines untasted, its flowers unsmelt, and be crammed away into the darkness—hungry, thirsty, and unsatisfied. Take my word for it, Vic, you'll have a bad five minutes on your deathbed!"
I listened in silence. I felt ill and dispirited and disinclined for talk.
"That's all Horace. I don't care much about Latin as a whole, but I do think he is splendid. I'd have that book made the general testament. I'd have it taught in all the Board Schools and sworn on in the Law Courts. I'd have every fellow take it as a guide through life; if he really acts up to it, it ensures his happiness. Its philosophy beats all the religions hollow. 'Take the day.' 'Put no trust in to-morrow.' 'Seek not to know the future; whatever it is, bear it.' 'Each night be able to say I have lived.' 'Retire from life, satisfied, as from a banquet.' And so on ad lib. You know it all, Victor. You were brought up upon it, but you haven't profited by it—not a scrap. Well, I'm going!"
He leant forward, picked up his shoes, and went into his own room. It was about twelve when he came in that night and found me just finishing off a chapter. The fire had gone out from neglect; the window stood open and the lace curtains waved in the damp night wind. Howard stalked across the room and banged the glass doors shut, and told me it was beastly cold in here. I was just fully absorbed in the closing passages of my scene, and felt a nervous irritation at being interrupted.
"There's a fire-lighter behind the scuttle, throw it into the grate and you'll soon have a blaze," I said, without looking up.
Howard drew off his lavender gloves and flung them down on the table. One fell on the last sheet I had written.
"Confound you! do be careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing the great blur it left on the page. "The sheets are wet."
"It doesn't matter, they're not a new pair!" answered Howard, coolly, going down on his knees to light up the fire. He accomplished this in a few minutes, and then settled down in the long chair with a cigar. I wrote on feverishly, expecting to be addressed and interrupted every moment. It was a great bore his coming in just now, disturbing me. I had a difficult thing to express, and I was just pursuing the tail end of an idea I could not quite grasp. My pen hovered uncertainly over the paper. I could not exactly give words to the impression in my brain, and the sense that he was going to speak, about to speak each second, worried me. At the same time I never wished to be ungracious to Howard when he did return to our rooms; never wished to feel it was my execrably bad company that induced him to stay away from them all night instead of half.
"I say, Vic!"
"Well?"
"Do you know that kissing song Embrasse moi?"
I nodded.
"Don't you think it awfully fetching? I like that refrain so much—Embrasse moi, chumph! chumph!—and then the orchestra exactly imitates the sound of a kiss—then Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph! Don't you?"
"Yes; it isn't bad."
Silence.
"Victor!"
"What?"
"La Faina was there to-night!"
"Oh!"
"Do you know her?"
"I've heard of her."
Silence.
"Vic!"
"Yes?"
"Do you know what Faina means?"
"Of course I do!"
"Do you think it a nice name?"
"Not particularly."
"Well, it's better than Grille d'Egout anyway, isn't it?"
"About on a par, I should say." "How many frills do you think she had on her petticoat?"
"Oh, I don't know—forty!"
"No; four. I counted them. Her figure is not much up atop, but her"—
"Oh, stow all that!" I interrupted; "there's a good fellow, I'm just doing a convent interior."
"All right. The rest is silence. Ah!" with a yawn, and getting up to saunter round the room, "that's a jolly good song—Embrace moi! chumph! chumph! Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph!"
He did not address me again, but somehow my ideas were scattered. The convent scene went wrong. Ballet dancers seemed standing in the aisle where nuns should have been kneeling, and, after a second or so, I flung my pen down and pushed away the paper.
"Done?" exclaimed Howard, delightedly.
"Yes," I said simply, rising.
"Come and have a smoke," he said, drawing up both easy chairs to the fire.
I took the cigar he offered and sat down. Howard threw himself into the other chair, crossed his legs, and proceeded to give me an account of his experiences. I suppose I was rather silent, for after a time he broke in upon himself by saying abruptly,—
"Are you very savage with me for interrupting your work?"
"Savage?" I repeated. "Oh, no! the work can wait, I get plenty of time at it!" Perhaps he misunderstood me, and my words conveyed to him more than I meant. Any way, the next afternoon he came home early to dine with me, and afterwards, when I was speaking of the evening's work, he came up to me where I stood at the mantelpiece and took something out of his pocket with a confident air.
"I've brought you something," he said, and he thrust suddenly into my hand—under my eyes—a photograph.
My glance fell full on it, and I saw distinctly what it was—a full-length figure of the danseuse Faina. Traditionally, perhaps, I ought to have flung it into the fire—any way the grate—or torn it up. But I am not fond of throwing other, people's things into the fire, nor of tearing them up, simply because they offend my own views. He had no right, perhaps, to thrust it upon me as he had, but that fact would not, in my opinion, constitute my right to destroy it. So I merely laid it on the mantelpiece.
"Extraordinary thing! Where did you pick that up?"
"Faina sent it to you with her love, and an invitation to supper to-night after the last 'turn,'" replied Howard, rolling a cigarette, sticking it with his lips, and looking at me over it.
"Oh! really?" I said, drily.
"Why, Victor, you've quite coloured up!" said Howard with a sort of derisive triumph.
I felt I had. Why? I can hardly say. The word "love," the sudden view of the portrait, dashed, whirling headlong over each other, through my brain, followed by a sort of hazy cloud, out of which looked two azure eyes.
"She is very lovely, isn't she?" Howard remarked affectionately, setting the card upright against the wall.
"Very—in her own way," I assented.
I admitted it willingly, with pleasure. Why not?—an evident fact. The blue slime in a blocked gutter of the road is very lovely also.
"Well, I'm going there to-night, because I admire the sister, and you must come, too. You are killing yourself by sticking to the work in the way you do. Come along! Where's the harm? Lucia will never know. I won't split. God's in heaven and the Czar's a long way off! So you may as well come and knock about a little. This monotonous life will put an end to you!"
I was silent.
"Lucia won't know," he repeated.
"There's no question of Lucia's knowing anything," I said.
"Then why do you work as you do, and always refuse to come to a supper, or a dance, or anything? You can't be really a quiet fellow or you wouldn't write things the English won't have. You say it's not a question of Lucia—then what the dickens is it that makes you live the life you do?"
I did not answer him. I leant in silence against the mantelpiece, staring absently at the portrait of Faina, and Howard got tired of waiting for my answer. He went to dress, and I sat down at the writing-table, absently sketching women's heads on my blotting paper. Should I go with him or not? I felt tired of writing, tired of work. Wine, laughter, sound, smiles, other voices?—Then four points rose before me, very distinct and clear, like sharp mountain peaks from a valley of mist.
FIRST. Supposing—if such a thing were possible—supposing on coming out of this house I came face to face with Lucia, should I be entirely pleased.
NEXT. Should I, when the present inclination were over, have a satisfactory memory of this supper.
NEXT. Did I habitually mean to spend my evenings in this way?
LAST. Was it worth while spoiling a record for the sake of a single deviation?
I answered No to each of these as they came before me in order, with the upshot that I determined not to go. When Howard came in again I looked up. He was dressed to the Enth, and as I glanced at his good-looking, intelligent face, I thought how incongruous it seemed for him to degrade himself with drink at this supper, and return, as he probably would, a pitiable object to look at and listen to.
"Going to work, eh?"
I nodded. Howard hitched the cape of his overcoat straight, and went out. As he shut the door I sprang suddenly to my feet. For a moment the impulse towards distraction, amusement, relief from strain, physical movement, overcame me. All the strong, ardent life rushed up within me. A tremendous prompting came to shout after him, "Wait a minute, Howard! I'll come, too, after all!" I was half way to the door. Then I laughed and turned back. I went up to the mantelpiece and unlocked the doors of a portrait frame that stood there, and flung them open. It was the frame of Lucia's portrait, which, like the temple of Janus, stood closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Now was war, and I gazed at the picture within for encouragement. There was equal sinuous, supple beauty in this form as in that outline on the Paris card, that lay, perhaps, in the pocket of every flaneur on the boulevards. I looked at the smooth, perfect shoulders, and those soft arms that had never yet been drawn round a lover's neck; at the extreme pride and dignity that lay in every line of the form that had never been touched by a rough hand. It swept from me in one gust the thoughts and tendencies struggling to rise. It brought back all the old revolt from the lowest, all the old admiration for the highest, in human nature. "Yes, you are worth it," I muttered, looking hard at the chaste, exquisite pride in face and form; "you are worth being worthy of, and I will not for an evening, nor for an hour, make myself a brute that you would despise if you knew his nature. Whether you ever know or not, what does that matter? I must know. Shall I come back to feel your inferior? No! Not a day, nor a night, shall there be, the history of which you might not read." All my own pride was stirred as I looked at the portrait of this woman, who, I knew, was absolutely pure, and I would not now have followed Howard had my life depended on it.