A Man of Moods

Chapter I

HpHE first grey of the morning was showing over London after a night of heavy rain. Holden came out of Gray's Inn, where he had sat since midnight, talking and smoking with certain of his friends. A few belated cabs were waiting in the long grey shining street ; one of them came towards him with a noise of jingling bells, but he preferred to walk, and followed a maze of back streets (where strange old women in sordid black sat asleep in quiet doorways) towards Covent Garden. He had often gone thither after such a vigil, having found out that the sight and scent of the flowers invariably changed that sense of evil-doing which London, more than other places, imposes on the night bird, to such a feeling of freshness and good cheer as they experience who are up to see the sun rise in the country.

The plain truth was that he possessed an exorbitant love of flowers, and never left the market without a handful of exquisite flesh pink Catherine Mermet roses, or, when autumn came, a sheaf of wonderful dishevelled chrysan themums. It was now late in the year. The season of fogs had come and gone as completely as it ever goes from London. Christmas was close at hand, and the book-shops were daily crowded with the people who only buy books at that season of the year. But in the market were all the flowers of half - a - dozen untimely springs. Violets had now usurped the place of the mignonette whose fragrance had come to him like a new birth on certain cool June mornings. But the crowning beauty of the place consisted in its close-packed masses of scarlet anemones, and especially, in its banks of yellow daffodils and pale narcissi.

In places their heavy odour warred against and over came the scent of the violets, and everywhere the pale gold of the blooms was notable. The proper business of the market had hardly begun as yet. The salesmen were breakfasting on tea or coffee, with huge slabs of buttered toast, brought in on the tops of flower-boxes from outside. Many of the stalls were without attendants. Holden went his way. Now and again he paused to ask the price of something which had struck his fancy, carelessly declared it monstrous, and passed on. He would surely buy some flowers presently, but he had more particularly come to see the market. Presently, however, he was aroused to keener interest by the sight of a stall which was all pale gold, being entirely stocked with flowers more or less after the fashion of the daffodil.

There were some verses of his youth which had almost convinced him — for a fort night — that the gods had made him a poet ; they had been written in praises of daffodils, and he still loved the flowers intensely. He paused and laughed at his old ambitions. Daffodils never failed to remind him of them, pleasing him all the better for that very reason. Suddenly a voice disturbed him : " Pretty, sure 'nough, aren't they ? Wonderful pretty, they are, sure 'nough ! " He turned and stared at the intruder, a tall spare man of sixty or thereabouts, brown of face and wrinkled at the outer corners of keen grey humorous eyes. Time's record on men's faces is a very full one. Holden recognised not only the number of the stranger's years, but also that they had been passed in country air. "Yes," he said unconcernedly, "they're pretty."

He turned away again. " And yet," said the countryman, his cheer fulness maintained, " we do grow them in fields over in Scilly. 'Twould be a fine sight for a Londoner." Something of the true rustic pity for the town-dweller was evident in his tones. Holden faced him again, compelled to own that he was interested. " You are a flower grower ? " The old man laughed with pride. "There's no man better known in the market of all that grow flowers in Scilly. See, 'tis my name on these boxes." He lifted a box of daffodils from the stall, and Holden read the name: "John Cunnack, St Mary's, Scilly." " Was you ever in Scilly, sir ?" asked the man. " No," replied Holden. " I have been in many places, but never there. It is such a long way off." " 'Tis true enough," said Cunnack. " I've heard our young men say 'tis less trouble to travel to the States than to London.

But you might go the world over and see no better sights than there are in Scilly : acres o' lilies under a sky that's never long without the sun, and the very sea air smellin' o' sweet flowers 'Tis a place a man do long to get back to." "You are tired of London ? " asked Holden curiously, for he could never understand how it was that men could be content to live perman ently out of London. " Tired ?" echoed the flower-grower. "'Tis too big and all too noisy for me, and I'd give the world to get back to a place where I'm known and do know. I had to come up over a small matter of business, but when once that is done with not all the pleasures in London'll keep me an hour." " They are little enough to keep a man," said Holden, " and yet they hold us." " Yes, I suppose," said Cunnack, " a man'll always call that good that he was born to like.

I know something of what London can do. There was one that would have given ten years of her life almost to come with me for these few days." Holden was suddenly interested, and the man went on to explain. "A niece of mine," he said. "I've a little niece that wouldn't choose to reign in glory if she had a chance to see London instead. But, of course, I couldn't bring her." "Well," said Holden, "she will see it some day, no doubt," and he turned away. Then, remembering that he had made no purchase, he went back and bought a big bunch of giant daffodils, with great golden tubes, and paler rays behind. He nodded to the old man, who stood watching the sale of the flowers he had grown. A moment later he was walking to wards his chambers. The streets were less deserted now. Men were going to their work, and a continuous stream of florists' carts and wagons flowed from the suburbs towards Covent Garden.

He reached his rooms and put the flowers to stand in water in a big Delft vase on the table. Then he turned to his letters. There was a book to review, and he knew that it had been sent to him only that it might irritate him into the writing of a clever and probably unjust article. He recognised the handwriting on the envelope of another letter, and knew it contained a proof which would have to be corrected before he got any sleep. The article was one which he had written a few nights earlier in a fit of disgust with London and its life. It was a plea for holy simplicity, and for the rejection of the in essential ; suggesting that the wine of life was in effect no more satisfying than its beer, while it was vastly more expensive, and further laying it down that the very end of existence was to shirk the imposition of labour, which was the curse entailed by Adam on his sons.

It asserted that a man might, if he chose, become sufficient to his own needs, and that, in order to have liberty to enjoy the realities of life, one must of necessity be moderate in the matter of his desires. In its concluding sentences the article came near to being blasphemous, for the young man turned violently upon his own gods, and swore that even culture was a sorry gain, in that, while intensifying certain faculties of enjoyment, it diminished the sources at which they might be gratified. Only one thing was wholly good : the smell of country earth, and at the thought of this he rhapsodised a little, ending with a fragment of verse, a memory of a night when he had got away from town and gone wandering late : — Thin clouds have come across the sky, Where late the stars were shining ; The wind's a promise of the rain For which the earth was pining.

The trim-set gardens have the smell Of country earth, new broken : God loves His creatures passing well, And gives such nights for token. Holden went over the proof without taking any particular note of the matter it contained. He put it into an envelope, and went down to post it. On his return he saw the book lying on his table, and laid it with a pile of others in a corner of the room. For a moment he lingered to arrange the daffodils, his fingers straying lovingly among the petals. Then he rolled a cigarette and went to his bed. Guy Holden's history was of an altogether common type. He was the only son of his mother, a clergyman's widow, who had deemed it her first duty to send him to as good a school as her means would compass for him. By dint of very considerable sacrifices she sent him to Oxford, where he won a scholarship at one of the smaller colleges.

She had hoped that his father's calling would be his also, but he gradually convinced her that the hope was one she must abandon. He was near the end of his fourteenth year when she died, somewhat suddenly. The chief part of her wealth had been an annuity which died with her ; but the son inherited a small — a very small — income, and had no reason for immediate anxiety when he came to the end of his term at Oxford. It was perhaps fortunate that the good lady died when she did, for she entertained the conviction that her son was clever to a pre posterous extent, and went on, illogically, to suppose that a man's degree depends almost entirely upon the talents he possesses. Un fortunately Holden had ever been a lover of byways. The delightful lectures which the prudent avoid, because they "do not pay for Schools," he attended with a desultory devotion ; those that might have helped him to a high position in the Honours list he cut consistently.

In the course of time he came to know more than a little concerning one or two of the writers who are only respectable names to the majority. Of novels — though he appeared to believe in his inmost soul that prose fiction began and ended with Fielding — he possessed a knowledge which was almost encyclopædic. Naturally he took to writing after a time ; at first for a singularly, and even pretentiously, esoteric college review, and afterwards for the one or two London journals which he found willing to print him. The result of it all was to make his degree a thing hardly worth mentioning. When he left Oxford, therefore, he took to writing. He published a little novel of which the critics spoke kindly. He did an immense quantity of journalism of the unattached variety, and gradually achieved a position more or less assured.

When he had been at it five or six years — at the time when this history of an episode opens — he was making an income sufficient for his needs, which, if they were not particularly modest, were certainly not extravagant. He was popular among his fellows, though the more seriouslyminded among them always felt that an excess of seriousness was his especial bane. There were women — chiefly married — who liked him ; and children took to him instinctively. He had sometimes been regarded as fickle and changeable, by people who did not understand that there are cases in which a change of this kind cannot be proven by any reference to the actions of the person accused, since a man's actions are often but desperate concealments of his motives. For the rest, he had already published his second book, and aasain achieved a success with the critics which the public had yet to ratify.

A third was on the verge of publication. Finally, he was eight-and-twenty, or some where thereabouts, and, to all appearances, London held no more willing prisoner.

Chapter II. T-jolden

had a sew hours of sleep and then arose and went about the ordinary business of the day. Most of the time he spent at work in his rooms, and these hours were more than usually unproductive. The flowers upon his table reminded him continually of the man he had talked with in Covent Garden, and of the evident delight he took in his occupation of gardener. After all, the old man had every reason to feel and to express his delight. It was altogether a more notable achievement to have multipled daffodils and gay scarlet anemones upon the face of the earth than to have written even the best book of which one might conceivably be capable. Moreover, it was never permitted to any man to see his name upon the title-page of that book. In the evening he dined at a crowded little restaurant with a friend, Teddy Lancaster, 17 B After much talk on subjects of no particular importance he spoke the thing that was in his mind.

" I've issued a manifesto, Teddy," he said. Teddy twinkled behind his pince-nez. " Another? " he said simply. Holden sipped his liqueur. " I fancy I've said it before," he said reflectively. " It's the old complaint : that this life is not worth while. Except for the half-hour after dinner, one might add, of course." " Lord ! " said Teddy. " And will some one publish that ? " Holden disregarded the interruption. " I can see well enough that life might be very tolerable if it were possible to live it on one's own terms. But this particular kind of life somehow sickens me. Sooner or later — I wish I thought it would be soon — I shall chuck it." " All roads lead to Waterloo Bridge," said Teddy flippantly; "but talk as much as you like. What is the particular grievance now ? " " My dear fellow," said Holden, "suicide is very often the last resort of life's truest lovers, but Heaven forbid I should go that way.

It is London I would pitch overboard, for the simple reason that to exist in London I must practically deny myself the privilege of living. For what London gives me as the reward of rny devotion is nothing. I do not want to hear before it gets into the papers what is the latest bon mot of the newest jester ; I do not want to see the newest play, or to be an adept in music halls. I don't much care whether the last bad book sells or not, or whether it is damned by the critics, or praised to the skies. Give me a week away from London, and I'll forget them all, and need them no more than I shall need an evening paper. But here I must be inter ested in them all because there is nothing else to do." " All this should make an article," said Teddy, " and I never read the weekly journals. But continue."

"Well, then," said Holden, "the point of my objection is this. Being what I am and in London, I must spend a certain amount of money in necessary things : dinners, cabs, theatres, clothes — even my chambers. I haven't the faculty of living on my debts, and therefore am driven to do ten times the amount of work I should need to do if I lived otherwise, and all of it of the sort that a man would never dream of doing except for money. Such work is the only labour. The money brings me the privilege of living my present life in London — the only life I can like in London ; which, to be frank, I value at nothing at all. For there is no pleasure I buy here for which I should not o-et a more excellent substitute at no cost of labour if once I had the sense to take my freedom." "One would think," said Teddy, "that you had been in town a twelvemonth, and raved against London just because you felt yourself becomings acclimatised.

Men do. I did three or four stories, some articles, and no end of verses at that stage. The money they brought me made my chambers so delightful that I could not take a holiday, and so vexed all my people at Christmas. It must be sad to be one of the mob, whose emotions are emotions only, and not copy also. But don't pretend that you have yearnings after the country. The return to nature is not for you." For some minutes a waiter had been hover ing about in the vicinity of the corner they occupied. " They want our table," said Holden. He paid the waiter, and they went out together into the street. It was raining heavily, as it had rained all the day through. Teddy Lancaster had to go to a newspaper office, and the two parted immediately, Holden walking down to his rooms. He was still filled with a sense of revolt.

The article he had revised on the previous night was in all essentials one he had written and seen published many times before. But this re-incarnation of his old ideas had resulted from a more than ordinarily strong fit of disgust with London. He knew perfectly well that the mood would pass in a day or two, and that he would be at least passively reconciled to what he now hated. But this self-knowledge did not serve to quiet him, for he could not convince himself that his present discontent was not the only mood of wisdom. He felt, also, that the change which it dictated was now possible to him. Later on, he might still have his periods of rebellion, but he would have become so thoroughly sodden with London air that to act upon his moods would be to invite and ensure disaster. One verse, of all that he had read, came back to him, and as he sat smoking he repeated it so often, and with so complete an unconsciousness, that it seemed to be the voice of his own loncring : o o I will arise and go now, for always, night and day, I hear lake-water lapping with low sounds on the shore ; As I stand in the roadway, or on the pavement grey, I hear it in the deep hearts core.

Gradually the verses did form themselves into his own resolve. He would leave London, abandon the labour of work done merely for the sake of money, and seek those natural pleasures for which man, desiring to make heavier the original curse, had sought out substitutes whose only merit was that they were purchased at the price of enslavement. He would go away to some place where men lived simply and came face to face with naked nature ; the air would be cool and cleansing, and the smell of the earth make the nights fragrant if he should choose to wander late. He did not think it would ever seem worth while to write again : but if the mood took him he would write. In any case there would be no lack of occupation. His resolve had grown suddenly out of his discontent, but at first it was so indefinite that, knowing himself, he feared it might evaporate with the fatigue that sleep would cure.

He had always hated making definite plans, but he now saw that if he would compel himself to act wisely he must overcome this natural infirmity. His eyes fell upon the daffodils loosely put together in a jar upon his table. He remembered the shrewd, honest face of the man Cunnack whom he had met in Covent Garden, and his words concerning Scilly : " acres o' lilies under a sky that's never long without the sun, and the very sea air smellin' o' sweet flowers." And in a moment his resolve was made. He would quit London immediately, and his experiment of simpler life should be made at Scilly, with the sea always at hand and flowers everywhere. No place could be better fitted for such a trial, and if it proved a failure he could come back and forget that he had ever fancied himself possessed of the secret of wisdom.

Then having pledged himself to a definite course of action, he sought his bed, assured that he should sleep. The days that followed were filled with a growing excitement. He had never been accustomed to announce his movements, and had already earned a certain reputation for eccentricity by sudden departures from his wonted haunts. Even now, when he imagined himself to be leaving London finally, he did not deem it necessary to explain his intentions. He had to examine his belongings, and choose out those of them which would be essential to him in the future. Most of his books he re jected, for most of them dealt with matters that would no longer concern him. His furniture, some of it good, and the little rarities in china which he had collected mainly because it was the thing one did when situated as he was, he disposed of without a pang.

Indeed, he even found himself wantonly sacrificing more things than one for no better reason than the pleasure he had in feeling that these, which had been more than essential, had become of no conse quence at all. Then he went the round of certain ancient haunts, and enjoyed them with hardly less keenness than he had done when first he made their acquaintance. Still the reason was the same: there had been occasions beyond number when they had failed to amuse and distract him. Now he was going away to a simpler life, and would depend on simpler things for the pleasures he should desire. Somehow, he had never before realised the magnificence of London as he did in these last days. The pageant of the streets — that living dream-picture which includes the whole of life — had never seemed so keenly interesting.

He did not wonder that some men never awoke to wisdom as he had done ; and there were moments when he almost envied them. But his resolve was fixed, and he looked forward with a fervid eagerness to the hour when his experiment should begin. Even at the last he chose to see the city at its best, and so he took the night mail from Paddington. As he drove to the station there were lights innumerable, the noise of wheels, moving crowds, and the roar of life. He leant forward in his hansom and watched, remembering nights when he had come back after a few weeks of absence and felt that London was the only place where a man may call himself at home. He watched with the same excited interest now, seeing more that was notable from his cab than one would usually observe in a whole week of desultory wandering.

But it was a desire to reckon up and know the things he was so gladly abandoning that made him thus eagerly observant. In the train he slept. When he awoke he was at Plymouth. The newspapers were on sale, and the dawn began to appear. There was already an exquisite freshness in the air, and as he paced the platform he felt a new life moving in his veins. The Tamar, when they crossed it, was still veiled in mist, and after wards, as they went through Cornwall, there were mists above the woods that lined the valleys. But the sunlight made them splendid, striking through them from the east, and the bare woodlands had already a vague promise of the spring. Even the fulness of day, when the train went slowly through regions desolated and defaced by the works of mines long since abandoned, did not dissipate his feeling of delight.

A blithe wind was blowing inland as they passed through the marshes of Marazion, the brown sedge was swaying, and the water ruffled and blue. The sea was breaking exultantly in splendid green, and further out the blue of it was flecked with white. Everything lived. Even St Michael's Mount looked picturesque, the sunlight brightening its coat of brown fern. Holden was almost regretful when the train stopped under the shelter of a massive granite wall against which the waves were breaking high, and he knew that this part of his journey was ended.

Chapter III. At

the hotel he breakfasted in a room which overlooked the sea ; the sight increased his impatience, and he was early on board the little steamer that was to take him to Scilly. One can imagine an Algerine slave escaping out of captivity with very much the emotions he experienced as the little steamer moved away from Penzance. It was rough, and there were few passengers. Holden stopped on deck and looked for the apparition of the islands. Presently they appeared, and gradually the steamer beat her way through the rough water towards them. It found a passage among scattered islands, low-lying, many-coloured, and gentle of curve, and so gained the harbour they enclose and protect. The steamer presently put in at a decent granite pier, on which a little crowd of islanders awaited its arrival, and Holden had reached the end of his journey.

He went through the town — a fishing-town of cleaner, wider streets — to his hotel. He remembered the island as one of gently curvinohills covered with delicious turf, with boulders of grey-lichened granite everywhere protruding. In waste places there were jon quils growing, and huge geranium plants covered the white fronts of the cottages. In some of the gardens there were gigantic aloes ; hardly a wall had not its thick cloak of clamber ing ice-plant. There were shops in the village, but he could hardly fancy they were ever the scene of business transactions. While first he lived there he had a continual sense of dwelling insecurely on the smallest imaginable space of earth in the midst of illimitable seas. But gradually the charm of the place mastered him, and when he had gone from it he called to mind a little island, lost in the sea, indeed, but magically secluded from storm and wreck and all the sea's old horrors.

Never any storm can reach This our island in the sea, Where, upon the shining beach, Light waves murmur restfully. Here we dream the livelong day In the sunlight, and forget Cares of earth left leagues away, Joys that lie beyond regret. Call no more ! No voice can reach Our dim island in the sea : Once we gained tlie murmurous beach, Lost to love and life were we. He went to the hotel, watching everything as he went with an eager delight. A certain touch of the locality in the speech of those who came to attend to his wants was as delicious to him as a hint of peat-fragrance in country cream. But he could not begin to rest yet. His journey would not be ended until he had found a place in which to lodge, and made it his by disposing in it such of his belongings as he had brought along with him.

He ate his lunch, and then the memory of his friend of Covent Garden came to him. He made inquiries as to his place of abode, and set forth to find him. The sunlight was warm and bright. There were daffodils in every garden, and here and there he caught sight of a long, low glass house standing in the eye of the sun. He had the heart of a boy again as he went onward. John Cunnack's house was a big thatched cottage with white - washed earthen walls. There were pink monthly roses clambering up its front, and stray flowers in the garden. A low, broad hedge parted it from the road, and over this the heavy ice-plant hung almost to the ground. He opened the gate, and stepped across the garden to the open door. He knocked and waited. The door opened into a great kitchen its brick floor neatly sanded, and on the dresser a big array of china-ware.

Holden was charmed with the place. He knocked again, and shifted his feet on the granite door-stone, and immediately he heard footsteps on the stairs. In another moment a girl appeared, and before she had said a word he recognised in her the niece of whose longing to see London Cunnack had spoken. She was young — he could hardly fancy her much beyond seven teen — and, for all the healthiness of her life, her face was very pale. Her eyes were quick and grey ; he had not been speaking with her long before he perceived that she had a pretty trick of looking up under her lashes with a delightful smile. For the rest, she wore a thin frock of softened scarlet, like the tint of a field of poppies seen from a long way off. On her head was an odd little brown cap, made of the husk that grows about the base of palm trunks in foreign parts.