Chapter LVI
It was impossible that Rickman's intimacy with Miss Harden should pass unnoticed by the other boarders. But it was well understood by Miss Roots, by Flossie and by all of them, that any attentions he paid to her were paid strictly to his editor's cousin. And if there was the least little shade of duplicity in this explanation, his conscience held him so far guiltless, seeing that he had adopted it more on Lucia's account than his own. Incidentally, however, he was not displeased that it had apparently satisfied Flossie.
But if Flossie felt no uneasiness at the approaches of Mr. Rickman and Miss Harden, the news that Lucia was staying under the same roof with the impossible young poet could hardly be received with complacency by her relations. It threw Edith Jewdwine into an agony of alarm. Horace as yet knew nothing about it; for he was abroad. Even Edith had heard nothing until her return from her autumn holiday in Wales, when a letter from Lucia informed her that she would be staying for the next week or two with Sophie Roots in Tavistock Place. Edith was utterly unprepared for her cousin's change of plans. She had not asked Lucia to go with her to Wales; for Lucia's last idea had been to spend September and October in Devonshire with Kitty Palliser. Edith, eager for her holiday, had not stopped to see whether the arrangements with Kitty were completed; and Lucia, aware of Edith's impatience, had omitted to mention that they were not. But what made Lucia's move so particularly trying to Edith was the circumstance that relations between them had latterly been a little strained; and when Edith searched her heart she found that for this unhappy tension it was she and not Lucia who had been to blame.
And now (while Lucia was resting calmly on Mr. Rickman's sofa), in the grave and beautiful drawing-room of the old brown house at Hampstead a refined and fastidious little lady walked up and down in a state of high nervous excitement. That little lady bore in her slight way a remarkable resemblance to her brother Horace. It was Horace in petticoats, diminutive and dark. There was the same clearness, the same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy mouth. Bat the flame of Edith's small steel black eyes revealed a creature of more ardour and more energy.
At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to entertain. For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always been as fastidious and refined as she could wish. The house and the drawing-room were mainly the cause of it. Before Horace became editor of The Museion, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment kept up with difficulty on a narrow income. In a drawing-room seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and (after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a preoccupied and superlatively married man. From this position, compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of culture and refinement as head of the great editor's house. She held a sort of salon, to which her brother's reputation attracted many figures if possible more distinguished than his own. She found herself the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious to stand well with Horace Jewdwine. With a dignity positively marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three years in that long drawing-room. She laid down the law grandiloquently to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with superb compliments those who had achieved. Happily for Edith those gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.
And then, in the very flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came. Lucia, with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm. And the little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia! To Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it, but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to satisfy that instinct of hers which was so fatal and so blind. And Horace, who to Edith's great relief had freed himself from this most undesirable attachment, who for three years had presented every appearance of judicious apathy, Horace, perceiving that men's eyes (and women's too) loved to follow and to rest upon his cousin, discovering all over again on his own account the mysterious genius of her fascination, had ended by bowing down and worshipping too. His adoration was the more profound (and in Edith's shrewd opinion more dangerous), because he kept it to himself; because it pledged him to nothing in the eyes of Lucia and the world.
But the eyes of the world, especially of the journalistic world, are exceedingly sharp; and if Lucia had not been charming in herself those literary ladies and gentlemen would have found her so, as the lady whom Horace Jewdwine was presumably about to marry. It was Hanson, Hanson of the Courier, who sent the rumour round, "La reine est morte, vive la reine." The superb despotic Edith saw herself not only deserted, but deposed; left with neither court nor kingdom; declining from the palace of royalty to the cottage of the private gentlewoman, and maintaining her imperious refinement on a revenue absurdly disproportioned to that end. Not that as yet there had been any suggestion of Edith's abdication. As yet Lucia had only spent her winter holidays at Hampstead. But when, at the end of the present summer, Lucia suddenly and unexpectedly broke down and her salary ceased with her strength, it became a question of providing her with a home for three months at the very least. Even then, the revolution was delayed; for Horace had gone abroad in the autumn. But with every month that Edith remained in power she loved power more; and in her heart she had been considering how, without scandal to the world, or annoyance to Horace, or offence to Lucia, she could put her rival delicately aside. She had long been on the look-out for easy posts for Lucia, for posts in rich and aristocratic families in the provinces, or better still for ladies in want of charming travelling companions.
But now, better, a thousand times better, that Edith should have been forced to abdicate than that Lucia should have taken herself out of the way in this fashion; a fashion so hideously suggestive of social suicide; that she should be living within four miles of her fastidious and refined relations in a fifth-rate boarding-house inhabitated by goodness knows whom. If only that had been all! Of course it was intolerable to think of Lucia mixing with the sort of people whom nobody but Goodness ever does know; but, after all, she wouldn't mix with them; she hadn't had time to; and if instantly removed from the place of contamination she might yet be presented to society again without spot or taint. But it was not all. Out of the many hundred base abodes of Bloomsbury Lucia had picked out the one house she ought to have avoided, the one address which for five years her cousin Horace had been endeavouring to conceal from her; it being the address of the one disreputable, the one impossible person of his acquaintance. Rickman had appeared, as strange people sometimes did, at Edith's court; an appearance easily explained and justified by the fact that he was a genius of whom Horace Jewdwine hoped great things. But he had never been suffered in that salon when Lucia had been there. Horace had taken untold pains, he had even lied frequently and elaborately, to prevent Lucia's encountering, were it only by accident, that one impossible person; and here she was living, actually living in the same house with him. Even if Rickman could be trusted to efface himself (which wasn't very likely; for if there is anything more irrepressible than a cockney vulgarian it is a poet; and Rickman was both!), could they, could anybody trust Lucia and her idiotic impulse to be kind? To be kind at any cost. She never calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating reflection for Miss Jewdwine. Poor as she was, she thought nothing of paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable lodging, when she might--she ought--to have been living with her relations free of all expense. But there was the sting, the unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay anything, rather than stop another week in Hampstead. And Edith knew that it was she who had made Lucia feel like that; she who had driven her to this deplorable step. Not by anything done, or said, or even implied; but by things not done, things not said, things darkly or passionately thought. For Lucia, with her terrible gift of intuition, must somehow have known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person's thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. Nobody can help their thoughts; and there was something positively indecent in the uncanny insight that divined them. All the same, Edith, confronted with the consequences of these movements of the unfettered brain, was stung with compunction and considerable shame. Horace would be furious when he knew; more furious with Edith than Lucia. Therefore Edith was furious with Sophia Roots, the cause of this disaster, who must have known that even if Lucia was too weak-minded to refuse her most improper invitation, that invitation ought never to have been given. Edith had her pride, the pride of all the Jewdwines and the Hardens; and her private grievances gave way before a family catastrophe. She did not want Lucia at Hampstead; but at all cost to herself Lucia must be brought back to her cousin's house before anybody knew that she had ever left it. It was even better that Horace should marry her than that they should risk the scandal of a mesalliance, or even-a passing acquaintance with a man like Rickman. She would go and fetch Lucia now, this very evening.
She went as fast as a hansom could take her, and was shown up into Rickman's room where she had the good luck to find Lucia alone. Lucia was too tired to go out very much; and at that moment of her cousin's entrance she was resting on Mr. Rickman's sofa. As the poor poet had been so careful to remove the more telling tokens of his occupation, Edith did not see that it was Mr. Rickman's room; and she was a little surprised to find Sophia Roots so comfortably, not to say luxuriously lodged.
She lost no time in delivering her soul, lest Sophia should pop in upon them.
"Lu-chee-a," she said with emphasis, "I think you ought to have told me."
"Told you what?"
"Why, that you hadn't anywhere to go to, instead of coming here."
"But I didn't come here because I hadn't anywhere to go to. I came because I wanted to see something of Sophie after all these years."
"You could have seen Sophie at Hampstead. I would have asked her to stay with you if I'd known you wanted her."
"That would have been very nice of you. But I'm afraid she wouldn't have come. You see she can't leave her work at the Museum--ever, poor thing."
"Oh. Then you don't see so much of Sophie after all?"
"Not as much as I should like. But I must be somewhere; and I'm perfectly happy here."
As she rose to make tea for Edith (at the poet's table, and with the poet's brass kettle), she looked, to Edith's critical eyes, most suspiciously at home. Edith's eyes, alert for literature, roamed over the bookcases before they settled on the tea-pot (the poet's tea-pot); but it was the tea-pot that brought her to her point. Did Lucia mix with the other boarders after all?
"This isn't a bad room," she said. "I suppose you have all your meals up here?"
"Only tea and breakfast."
"But, my dear girl, where do you lunch and dine?"
"Downstairs, in the dining-room."
"With all the other boarders?"
Lucia smiled. "Yes, all of them. You see we can't very well turn any of them out."
"Really, Lucia, before you do things like this you might stop to consider how your friends must feel about it."
"Why should they feel anything? It's all right, Edith, really it is."
"Right for you to take your meals with these dreadful people? You can't say they're not dreadful, Lucia; for they are."
"They're not half so dreadful as you might suppose. In fact you've no idea how nice they can be, some of them. Indeed I don't know one of them that isn't kind and considerate and polite in some way. Yes, polite. They're all inconceivably polite. And do you know, they all want me to stay on; and I've half a mind to stay."
"Oh, no, my dear, you're not going to stay. I've come to carry you off the very minute we've finished tea. Sophia should have known better than to bring you here."
"Poor little Sophie. If she can stand it, I might."
"That doesn't follow at all. And if you can stand it, your relations can't. So make up your mind that you're going back with me."
"It's extremely kind of you; but I should hurt Sophie's feelings terribly if I went. Why should I go?"
"Because it isn't a fit place for you to be in. To begin with, I don't suppose they feed you properly."
"You can't say I look the worse for it."
No, certainly she couldn't; for Lucia looked better than she had done for many months. In the fine air of Hampstead she had been white and languid and depressed; here in Bloomsbury she had a faint colour, and in spite of her fatigue, looked almost vigorous. What was more, her face bore out her own account of herself. She had said she was perfectly happy, and she looked it.
A horrible idea occurred to Edith. But she did not mean to speak of Rickman till she had got Lucia safe at Hampstead.
"Besides," said Lucia simply, "I'm staying for the best of all possible reasons; because I want to."
"Well, if it's pleasant for you, you forget that it's anything but pleasant for Horace and me. Horace--if you care what he thinks--would be exceedingly annoyed if he knew about it."
"Isn't he just a little unreasonable?"
"He is not. Is it nice for him to know that you prefer living with these people to staying in his house?"
"What would he say if he knew that one of these people lent us this room?"
The words and the smile that accompanied them challenged Edith to speak; and speak she must. But she could not bring herself to utter the abominable name. "And was that on Sophie's account or yours?"
"On both our accounts; and it was beautifully done."
"Oh, if it was done beautifully there's no doubt on whose account it was done. I should have thought you were the last person, Lucia, to put yourself under such an obligation."
"There was no obligation. It was kinder to Mr. Rickman to take his room than refuse it, that was all."
Lucia had no difficulty whatever in bringing out the name. And that, if Edith's perceptions had not been dulled by horror, would have struck her as a favourable sign.
"Young Rickman!" Edith's astonishment was a master stroke in all that it ignored and in all that it implied of the impossibility of that person. "Your notions of kindness are more than I can understand. Whatever possessed you to take his room? If he'd offered it fifty times!"
"But it wasn't wanted."
Edith relaxed the tension of her indignant body and sank back in her chair (or rather, Mr. Rickman's chair) with an immense relief. "You mean he isn't in the house at present?"
"Oh yes, he's in the house, I'm glad to say. Neither Sophie nor I could stand very much of the house without him."
That admission, instead of rousing Edith to renewed indignation, appeared to crush her. "Lucia," she murmured, "you are hopeless."
Another cup of tea, however, revived the spirit of remonstrance.
"I know you don't see it, Lucia, but you are laying yourself under an obligation of the worst sort; the sort that puts a woman more than anything in a man's power."
Lucia ignored the baser implication (so like Lucia). "I'm under so many obligations to Mr. Rickman already, that one more hardly counts." She hastened to appease the dumb distress now visible on her cousin's face. "I don't mean money obligations; though there's that, too--Horace knows all about it. I don't know if I can explain--" She laid her hands in her lap and looked at Edith and beyond her, with liquid and untroubled eyes; not seeing her, but seeing things very far off, invisible from Edith's point of view; which things she must endeavour, if possible, to make her see. "The kind of obligations I mean are so difficult to describe, because there's nothing to take hold of. Only, when you've once made a man believe in you and trust you, so that he comes to you ever afterwards expecting nothing but wonderful discernment, and irreproachable tact, and--and an almost impalpable delicacy of treatment, and you know that you failed in all these things just when he needed them most, you do feel some obligations. There's the obligation to make up for your blunders; the obligation to think about him in a certain way because no other way does justice to his idea of you; the obligation to show him the same consideration he showed to you; the obligation to take a simple kindness from him as he would have taken it from you--"
"My dear Lucia, you forget that a man may accept many things from a woman that she cannot possibly accept from him."
"Yes, but they are quite another set of things. They don't come into it at all. That's where you make the mistake, Edith. I've got--for my own sake--to behave to that man as finely as he behaved to me. I owe him a sort of spiritual redress. I always shall owe it him; but I'm doing something towards it now." She said to herself, "I am a fool to try to explain it to her. She'll never understand. I wish Kitty were here. She would have understood in a minute."
Edith did not understand. She thought that Lucia's perceptions in this matter were blunt, when they were only superlatively fine.
"All this," said she, "implies an amount of intimacy that I was not aware of."
"Intimacy? Yes, I suppose it is intimacy, of a sort."
"And how it could have happened with a man like that--"
"A man like what?"
"Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn't dream of allowing you to meet, even in his own house."
"Horace? You talk about my being under an obligation. It was he who helped to put me under it."
"And how?"
"By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave him a thought--when he had been so magnificent. There were a thousand things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an opportunity and he never gave it me. He can't blame me if I take it now."
"If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible reasons. He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could have any idea of. I don't know what he is now, but he was, at one time, thoroughly disreputable."
"Whatever did he do?"
"Do? He did everything. He drank; he ran after the worst sort of women--he mixes now with the lowest class of journalists in town; he lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the next house to this."
Lucia's face quivered like a pale flame.
"I don't believe it. I don't believe it for a moment."
"It's absurd to say you don't believe what everybody knows, and what anybody here can tell you."
"I never heard a word against him here. Ask Sophie She's known him for five years. Besides, I know him. That's enough."
"Lucy, when you once get hold of an idea you're blind to everything outside it."
"I take after my family in that. But no, I'm not blind. He may have gone wrong once, at some time--but never, no, I'm sure of it, since I knew him."
"Still, when a man has once lived that sort of life, the coarseness must remain."
"Coarseness? There isn't any refinement, any gentleness he isn't capable of. He's fine through and through. Stay and meet him, Edith, and see for yourself."
"I have met him."
"And yet you can't see?"
"I've seen all I want to see."
"Don't, Edith--"
There was a sound of feet running swiftly up the stair; the door of the adjoining room opened and shut, and a man's voice was heard singing. These sounds conveyed to Edith a frightful sense of the nearness and intimacy of the young man, and of the horror of Lucia's position. As she listened she held her cousin by her two hands in a dumb agony of entreaty.
"Horace is coming back," she whispered.
"No, Edith, it's no good. I'm going to stay till Kitty takes me."
Edith wondered whether, after all, Lucia was so very fastidious and refined; whether, indeed, in taking after her family, she did not take after the least estimable of the Hardens. There was a wild strain in them; their women had been known to do queer things, unaccountable, disagreeable, disreputable things; and Lucia was Sir Frederick's daughter. Somehow that young voice singing in the next room rubbed this impression into her. She stiffened and drew back.
"And am I to tell Horace, then, that you are happy here?"
"Yes. Tell him to come and see how happy I am."
"Very well."
As Edith opened the door to go, the voice in the next room stopped singing, and the young man became suddenly very still.
Chapter LVII
Lucia lay back in her chair, wondering, not at Edith, but at herself. Her cousin's visit had been so far effectual that it had made her aware of the attitude of her own mind. If she had been told beforehand that she could be happy in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, or within any reasonable distance of such people as Miss Bishop and Mr. Soper, the thing would have appeared to her absurd. And yet it was so. She was happy among these dreadful people, as she had not been happy at Hampstead among the cultured and refined. But when she came to examine into the nature of this happiness she found that it contained no positive element; that it consisted mainly of relief, relief from the strain of an incessant anxiety and uncertainty. That the strain had been divided between her and Horace had only made it worse, for she had had the larger share of the anxiety, he of the uncertainty. Not that he was more uncertain than in the old days at Harmouth. He was less so. But she had never been anxious then. For after all they had understood each other; and apparently it was the understanding now that failed. Yet Horace had been right when he told himself that Lucia would never imply anything, infer anything, claim anything, take anything for granted on the sanction of that understanding. She would not have hurried by a look or word the slow movements of the love which somehow he had led her to believe in. Love between man and woman to her mind was a sort of genius; and genius, as she said long ago to poor Rickman, must always have about it a divine uncertainty. Yes, love too was the wind of the divine spirit blowing where it listeth, the kindling of the divine fire. She had waited for it patiently, reverently, not altogether humbly, but with a superb possession of her soul. Better to wait for years than rush to meet it, and so be tossed by the wind and shrivelled by the fire. Then, when the crash came five years ago, though she could hardly conceive it as altering her cousin's attitude, she knew that it must alter hers. The understanding had been partly a family affair; and her side of the family was now involved in debt and poverty and dishonour. When the debts were paid off, and the poverty reduced and the honour redeemed, it would be time to re-consider the understanding. But, as it was just possible that Horace, if not exactly fascinated by her debts and all the rest of it, might feel that these very things bound him, challenged him in some sort to protection, Lucia withdrew herself from the reach of the chivalrous delivering arm. She took her stand, not quite outside the circle of the cousinly relation, but on the uttermost fringe and verge of it, where she entered more and more into her own possession. They met; they wrote long letters to each other all about art and literature and philosophy, those ancient unimpassioned themes; for, if Lucia assumed nothing herself she allowed Horace to assume that whatever interested him must necessarily interest her. In short, perceiving the horrible situation in which poor Horace had been left by that premature understanding, she did everything she could to help him out of it.
And she succeeded beyond her own or Horace's expectation.
After three years' hard work, when all the debts were paid, and she was independent, Lucia thought she might now trust herself to stay with Horace in his house at Hampstead. She had stayed there already with Edith when Horace was away, but that was different. And at first all was well; that is to say, there was no anxiety and no uncertainty. The calm and successful critic of The Museion knew his own mind; and Lucia said to herself that she knew hers. The understanding between them was perfect now. They were simply first cousins; each was the other's best friend; and they could never be anything else. She stood very much nearer to the heart of the circle, in a place where it was warm and comfortable and safe. If Horace could only have let her stay there, all would have been well still. But a mature Lucia, a Lucia entirely self-possessed, calm and successful, too, in her lesser way; a Lucia without any drawbacks, and almost to his mind as uncertain as himself; a Lucia who might be carried off any day before his eyes by some one of the many brilliant young men whom it was impossible not to introduce to her, proved fatally disturbing to Horace Jewdwine. And it was then that the anxiety and uncertainty began.
They were at their height in the sixth year, when Lucia broke down and came to Hampstead to recover. Fate (not Lucia, of course; you could not think such things about Lucia) seemed anxious to precipitate matters, and Jewdwine in his soul abhorred precipitancy. Edith, too, was secretly alarmed, and Lucia could read secrets. But it was to avoid both a grossly pathetic appeal to the emotions and an appearance of collusion with the intrigues of Fate that Lucia had feigned recovery and betaken herself to Sophie in Tavistock Place, before, and (this was subtlety again), well before the return of Horace from his holiday. And if the awful reflection visited her that this step might prove to be a more importunate appeal than any, to be a positive forcing of his hand, Edith had dissipated it by showing very plainly that the appeal was to their pride and not their pity.
Lucia did not consider herself by any means an object of pity. She was happy. The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so. As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing in straightforward uninspired vulgarity. These people knew their own minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something. It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day; till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need to feign recovery, for recovery had come. And with it had come many benign and salutary things; the old delicious joy of giving pleasure; a new sense of the redeeming and atoning pathos of the world; all manner of sweet compunctions and tender tolerances; the divine chance, she told herself, for all the charities in which she might have failed. There had come Sophie. And there had come, at last, in spite of everything, Keith Rickman.
As for Keith Rickman, her interest in him was not only a strong personal matter, but it had been part of the cool intellectual game she had played, for Horace's distraction and her own deception; a game which Horace, with his subterfuges and suppressions, had not played fair. But when, seeking to excuse him, she began to consider the possible motives of her cousin's behaviour, Lucia was profoundly disturbed.
It had come to this: if Horace had cared for her he might have had a right to interfere. But he did not care. Therefore, no interference, she vowed, should come between her and her friendship for the poet who had honoured her by trusting her. She could not help feeling a little bitter with Horace for the harm he had done her, or rather, might have done her in Keith Rickman's eyes.
For all that she had now to make amends.
Chapter LVIII
Meanwhile the Beaver, like a sensible Beaver, went on calmly furnishing her house. She thoroughly approved of Keith's acquaintance with Miss Harden, as she approved of everything that gave importance to the man she was going to marry. If she had not yet given a thought to his work, except as a way (rather more uncertain and unsatisfactory than most ways) of making money, she thought a great deal of the consideration it brought him with that lady. She was prouder of Keith now than she ever had been before. But the Beaver was before all things a practical person; and she had perceived further that for Keith to make up to people like Miss Harden was one of the surest and quickest means of getting on. Hitherto she had been both distressed and annoyed by his backwardness in making up to anybody. And when Keith told her that he wanted to pay some attention to his editor's cousin, if she was a little surprised at this unusual display of smartness (for when had Keith been known to pay attention to any editors, let alone their cousins?), she accepted the explanation as entirely natural. She was wide awake now to the importance of Metropolis and Mr. Jewdwine. By all means, then, let him cultivate Mr. Jewdwine's cousin. And if there had been no Mr. Jewdwine in the case, Flossie would still have smiled on the acquaintance; for it meant social advancement, a step nearer Kensington. So nobody was more delighted than Flossie when Miss Harden invited Keith to tea in her own room, especially as she was always included in the invitation.
It was Miss Bishop, primed with all the resources of her science, who looked upon these advances with alarm. It struck Miss Bishop that Miss Harden and Mr. Rickman were going it pretty strong. She wouldn't have liked those goings on if she'd been Flossie. You might take it from her that gentlemen never knew their own minds when there were two to choose from; and Miss Bishop hadn't a doubt that it was a toss-up between Flossie and Miss Harden. Miss Harden would be willing enough; anybody could see that. Ladies don't keep on asking gentlemen to have tea with them alone in their rooms if they're not up to something.
It was not only Miss Bishop's fatal science that led her to these conclusions, but the still more fatal prescience of love. When Flossie was once securely married to Mr. Rickman the heart of Spinks would turn to her for consolation, that she knew. It was a matter of common experience that gentlemen's hearts were thus caught on the rebound. But if that Miss Harden carried off Rickman, there would be nothing left for Flossie but to marry Spinks, for the preservation of her trousseau and her dignity. Therefore Miss Bishop was more than ever set on Flossie's marrying Mr. Rickman.
They were turning over the trousseau, the trousseau which might play such a disastrous part in the final adjustment of Flossie's mind.
"Your dresses are orfully smart and that," said Ada; "and yet somehow they don't seem to do you justice. It would have been worth your while to go to a tip-top dressmaker, my dear. You'd have a better chance than that Miss Harden any day. No, I don't like you in that powder blue; I don't, really." Miss Bishop was nothing if not frank.
"I never go wrong about a colour," said Flossie passionately.
"No. It isn't the colour. It's the cut. It makes her look as if she 'ad a better figure than you; and that's nonsense. You've got a bust, and she hasn't. Gentlemen don't care to look at a girl who's as flat as two boards back and front. That's what I say, it's the cut that gives her her style."
"No, it isn't. It isn't her clothes at all; it's the way she carries them. She may look as if she was well dressed; but she isn't."
"Anyhow I like that coat of hers better than yours."
"It hasn't got the new sleeves," said Flossie, fondling her powder-blue.
It was this immobile complacency of hers in the face of his own profound and sundering agitations that stirred in Rickman the first stinging of remorse. For he could see that the poor Beaver, with her blind and ineradicable instinct, was going on building--you couldn't call them castles in the air--but houses such as Beavers build, houses of mud in running water. Her ceaseless winding in and out of shops, her mad and furious buying of furniture, her wild grasping at any loose articles that came in her way, from rugs to rolling-pins, appeared to him as so many futile efforts to construct a dam. Over and over again the insane impulse came on him to seize her little hands and stop her; to tell her that it was no good, that the absurd thing could never stand, that he alone knew the strength of the stream, its sources and its currents. But he hadn't the heart to tell her, and the Beaver went on constructing her dam, without knowing that it was a dam, because she was born with the passion thus to build.
She could not see that anything had happened, and Heaven forbid that he should let her see. He might abandon hope, but the Beaver he could not abandon. That was not to be thought of for an instant. He was too deeply pledged for that. Lest he should be in danger of forgetting, it was brought home to him a dozen times a day.
The very moment when Flossie was making that triumphant display of her wedding finery he had caught a glimpse of her (iniquitously) as he passed her room on his way to Spinks's. She was standing, a jubilant little figure, in the line of the half-open door, shaking out and trailing before her some white, shiny, frilly thing, the sight of which made him shudder for the terror, and sigh for the pity of it. And the girls' laughter and the banging of the door as he went by, what was it but a reminder of the proprieties and decencies that bound him? A hint that he had pledged himself thrice over by that unlawful peep?
It seemed to him that was the beginning of many unlawful glimpses, discoveries of things he ought never to have seen. Was it that he was more quick to see? Or that Flossie was less careful than she had been? Or was it simply the result of living in this detestable boarding-house, where, morally speaking, the doors were never shut? Propinquity, that had brought them together, had done its best for Flossie and its worst. It had revealed too little and too much. He had only to forget her for a week, to come back and see her as she really was; to wonder what he had ever seen in her. Her very prettiness offended him. Her flagrantly feminine contours, once admired, now struck him as exaggerated, as an emphasis of the charm which is most subduing when subdued. As for her mind, good Heavens! Had it taken him five years to discover that her mind was a cul de sac? When he came to think of it, he had to own that intellectually, conversationally even, he had advanced no farther with her than on the first day of their acquaintance. There was something compact and immovable about Flossie. In those five years he had never known her change or modify an opinion of people or of things. And yet Flossie was not stupid, or if she were her stupidity was a force; it had an invincible impetus and sweep, dragging the dead weight of character behind it. It was beginning to terrify him. In fact he was becoming painfully sensitive to everything she said or did. Her little tongue was neither sharp nor hard, and yet it hurt him every time it spoke. It did not always speak good grammar. Sometimes, in moments of flurry or excitement, an aspirate miscarried. Happily those moments were rare; for at bottom Flossie's temperament was singularly calm. Remembering his own past lapses, he felt that he was the last person to throw a stone at her; but that reflection did not prevent a shudder from going down his back every time it happened. And if her speech remained irreproachable, the offending strain ran through all her movements. He disliked the way she walked, and the way she sat down, the way she spread her skirts or gathered them, the way she carried her body and turned her head, the way her black eyes provoked a stare and then resented it, her changes of posture under observation, the perpetual movement of her hands that were always settling and resettling her hat, her hair, her veil; all the blushings and bridlings, the pruderies and impertinences of the pretty woman of her class, he disliked them all. He more than disliked, he distrusted her air of over-strained propriety. He detected in it the first note of falseness in her character. In a thousand little things her instincts, her perceptions were at fault.
This was disagreeably borne in upon him that first Saturday after Lucia's arrival, when he and Flossie were in the train going down to Ealing. The compartment was packed with City men (how he wished Flossie would turn her head and not her eyes if she must look at them!); and as they got in at Earl's Court, one of them, a polite person, gave up his seat to the lady. Flossie turned an unseeing eye on the polite person, and took his seat with a superb pretence of having found it herself after much search. And when Rickman said "Thanks" to the polite person her indignant glance informed him that she had expected support in her policy of repudiation.
"My dear Beaver," he said as he helped her on to the platform at Ealing, "when you take another person's seat the least you can do is to say Thank you."
"I never speak to gentlemen in trains and buses. That's the way they always begin."
"Good Heavens, the poor man was only being civil."
"Thank you. I've gone about enough to know what 'is kind of civility means. I wasn't going to lay myself open to impertinence."
"I should have thought you'd gone about enough to know the difference."
Flossie said nothing. She was furious with him for his failure to defend her from the insulting advances of the City gentleman. But perhaps she would hardly have taken it so seriously, if it had not been significant to her of a still more intolerable desertion. Ada Bishop had said something to her just before they started, something that had been almost too much even for Flossie's complacency.
"I'm glad," she still heard Ada saying, "you're going to take him out all day. If I were you I shouldn't let him see too much of that Miss Harden."
There hadn't been much to take hold of in Ada's words, but Ada's manner had made them unmistakable; and from that moment a little worm had begun to gnaw at Flossie's heart.
And he, as he looked at her with that strange new sight of his that was already bringing sorrow to them both, he said to himself that he supposed it was her "going about," her sad acquaintance with unlovely manners, that had made her as she was. Only how was it that he had never noticed it before? Poor little girl; it was only last Saturday when they had come back from looking over the house at Ealing that, drawing upon all the appropriate resources of natural history, he had called her a little vesper Vole, because she lived in a Bank and only came out of it in the evening. What Flossie called him that time didn't matter; it was her parsimony in the item of endearments that provoked him to excesses of the kind. And now the thought of those things made him furious; furious with himself; furious with Fate for throwing Flossie in his way; furious with Flossie for being there. And when he was ready to damn her because she was a woman, he melted, and could have wept because she was a Beaver. Poor little girl; one day to be called a vesper Vole, the next to be forgotten altogether, the next to be remembered after this fashion.
And so they went on silently together, Flossie in pain because of the little worm gnawing at her heart, he thinking many things, sad and bitter and tender things, of the woman walking by his side. From time to time she looked at him as she had looked at those City gentlemen, not turning her head, but slewing the large dark of her eye into its corner. Presently she spoke.
"You don't seem to have very much to say for yourself to-day."
"To-day? I'm not given to talking very much at any time."
"Oh, come, you don't seem to have any difficulty in talking to Miss Harden. I've heard you. Wot a time you did sit yesterday. And you were up there an hour or more before I came, I know."
"Three quarters of an hour, to be strictly accurate."
"Well, that was long enough, wasn't it?"
"Quite long enough for all I had to say."
Now that was playing into Flossie's hands, for it meant that he had had nothing to say after her arrival. And she was sharp enough to see it.
"That's all very well, Keith," said she, apparently ignoring her advantage, "but Ada says they'll be talking if she keeps on asking you up there just when she's all by herself. It's not the thing to do. I wouldn't do it if it was me, no more would Ada."
"My dear child, Miss Harden may do a great many things that you and Ada mayn't. Because, you see, she knows how to do them and you don't."
"Oh well, if you're satisfied. But it isn't very nice for me to 'ave you talked about, just when we're going to be married, is it?"
"I think you needn't mind Ada. Miss Harden knows that I have to see her sometimes, and that I can't very well see her in any other way. And I think you might know it too."
"Oh, don't you go thinking I'm jealous. I know you're all right."
"If I'm all right, who's wrong?"
"Well--of course I understand what you want with her; but I can't see what she wants with you."
"You little fool. What should she want, except to help me?"
Flossie said nothing to that, for indeed her mind had not formulated any clear charge against Miss Harden. Keith had annoyed her and she wanted to punish him a little. She was also curious to see in what manner the chivalry that had deserted her would defend Miss Harden.
He stood still and looked at her with brilliant, angry eyes.
"You don't understand a great deal, Flossie; but there's one thing you shall understand--You are not to say these things about Miss Harden. Not that you'll do her any harm, mind, by saying them. Think for one minute who and what she is, and you'll see that the only person you are harming is yourself."
Flossie did think for a minute, and remembered that Lucia was the daughter of a baronet and the cousin of an editor; and she did see that this time she had gone a bit too far.
"And in injuring yourself, you know, you injure me," he said more gently. "I don't know whether that will appeal at all to you."
It did appeal to her in the sense in which her practical mind understood that injury.
"Do you really think she'll be able to help you to a good thing?"
He laughed aloud. "I think she'll help me to many good things. She has done that already.
"Oh, well then, I suppose it's all right."
Though he said it was all right he knew that it was all wrong; that she was all wrong too. He wondered again how it was that he had never noticed it before. It seemed to him now that he must always have seen it, and that he had struggled not to see it, as he was struggling now.
Struggle as he would, he knew that he was only putting off the inevitable surrender. Putting off the moment that must face him yet, at some turning of the stair or opening of a door, as they went from room to room of the house that, empty, had once seemed to him desirable, and now, littered with the solid irrevocable results of Flossie's furnishing, inspired him with detestation and despair. How could he ever live in it? He and his dream, the dream that Lucia had told him was divorced from reality? She had told him too that his trouble all lay there, and he remembered that then as now she had advised a reconciliation. But better a divorce than reconciliation with any of the realities that faced him now. Better even illusion than these infallible perceptions. Better to be decently, charitably blind where women are concerned, than to see them so; to see poor Flossie as she was, a reality divorced from any dream.
A foolish train of thought that. As if he were only a dreamer. As if it were a dream that had to do with it. As if his dream had not long ago loved, followed, and embraced a divine reality. As if it had ever fallen away after that one superb act of reconciliation.
He had done poor Flossie some injustice. She suffered in his eyes because she came short, not of the dream, but of the reality. To be placed beside Lucia Harden would have been a severe test for any woman; but for Flossie it was cruelty itself. He had never subjected her to that, not even in thought; for he felt that the comparison, cruel to one woman, was profanation to the other. It was only feminine Fate who could be so unkind as to put those two side by side, that he might look well, and measure his love for Flossie by his love for Lucia, seeing it too as it was. Maddox had not been far wrong there. For anything spiritual in that emotion, he might as well have gone back to Poppy Grace. Better; since between him and Flossie that gross tie, once formed, could not be broken. Better; since there had at least been no hypocrisy in his relations with the joyous Poppy. Better anything than this baseness skulking under the superstition of morality. If a man has no other feeling for an innocent woman than that, better that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck than that he should offend by marrying her.
And yet there had been something finer and purer in this later love than in the first infatuation of his youth. On that day, seven days ago, the last day it had to live, he had been touched by something more sacred, more immortal than desire. There had been no illusion in the poetry that clothed the figure of a woman standing in an empty room, dearer to her than the bridal chamber; a woman whose face grew soft as her instinct outran the bridal terror and the bridal joy, divining beyond love the end that sanctifies it.
But beyond all that again he could see that, whereas the love of all other women had torn him asunder, the love of Lucia made him whole. Poppy had drawn him by his senses; Flossie by his senses and his heart; Lucia held him by his senses, his heart, his intellect, his will, by his spirit, by his genius, by the whole man. Long after his senses had renounced their part in her, the rest of him would cling to her, satisfied and appeased. And but for Flossie it would have been so even now. Though his senses had rest in Lucia's presence, their longing for her was reawakened, not only by the thought of his approaching marriage, but by the memory of that one moment when he had realized the mystery of it, the moment of poor Flossie's transfiguration, when he had seen through the thick material veil, deep into the spiritual heart of love. With Lucia the veil had been transparent from the first. It was not with her as it was with those women who must wait for the hour of motherhood to glorify them. Of those two years of his betrothal what was there that he would care to keep? Only one immortal moment, that yet knew of the mortality before and after it. While of the last seven days Lucia had made a whole heavenly procession of ascending hours, every moment winged with the immortal fire. Flying moments; but flame touched flame in flying, and they became one life.
But he was going to marry Flossie.
And she, the child that was to have borne the burden of his genius and his passion, poor little blameless victim of the imagination that glorifies desire, how would it be with her in this empty house, empty of the love she had looked for and would never find? How would it be with him? Had he pledged himself to a life of falsehood, and had he yet to know what torment awaited him at the hands of the avenging truth? Truth, as he had once defined it, was the soul of the fact. It was the fact that he was going to marry Flossie; but it was not the truth. Only love could have given it a soul and made it true. If he was bound to maintain that it had a soul when it hadn't, that was where the falseness would come in.
Yet no. He might go mad by thinking about it, but life after all was simpler than thought. Things righted themselves when you left off thinking about them. He would be unhappy; but that could only make Flossie unhappy if she cared for him. And in a year's time, when he had left off thinking, she would have left off caring. He had shrewdly divined that what Flossie chiefly wanted was to have children; or if she did not want it, Nature wanted it for her, which came to the same thing. As for mating her to a man of genius, that was just Nature's wanton extravagance. Maddox had once said that any man would have done as well, perhaps better; Flossie wouldn't care. Well, he would give her children, and she would care for them. Indeed, he sincerely hoped that for him she would not care. It would make things simpler. Maddox, he remembered, had also said that she was the sort of woman who would immolate her husband for her children; whereas Poppy--but then, Maddox was a beast.
It never occurred for a moment to him to throw Flossie over. That, he had settled once for all, could not now be done. Circumstances conspired to make the thing irrevocable. Her utter dependence on him, the fact that she had no home but the one he offered her, no choice between marriage and earning her own living in a way she hated, the flagrant half-domestic intimacy in which they had been living, more than all, the baseness of his past love, and the inadequacy of his present feeling for her, both calling on him to atone, all these things made a promise of marriage as binding as the actual tie. Their engagement might possibly have been broken off at any of its earlier stages without profound dishonour. It was one thing to jilt a girl within a decent interval of the first congratulations; another thing altogether to abandon her with her trousseau on her hands. It had gone so far that his failure at the last moment would be the grossest insult he could offer her.
Gross indeed; yet not so gross but that he could think of one still grosser--to let her marry him when he had no feeling to offer her but such indifference as marriage deepens to disgust, or such disgust as it tones down into indifference. Would he go on shuddering and wincing as he had shuddered and winced to-day? Passion that might have condoned her failings was out of the question; but would it be possible to keep up the decent appearance of respect?
And yet he was going to marry her.
That was impressed on him by Flossie's voice saying that if he wouldn't decide which of those two rooms was to be their room, she must. Because the men wanted to put up the bedstead.
It was an intimation that he was bound to her, not by any fine ties of feeling or of honour, but by a stout unbreakable chain of material facts. He looked out of the window. The vans were unloading in the street. It seemed to him that there was something almost grossly compromising in the wash-stand, dumped down there in the garden; and as the bedstead was being borne into the house in portions, reverentially, processionally, he surrendered before that supreme symbol of finality. As he had made his bed, he must lie; even if it was a brass bed with mother-o'-pearl ornaments; and he refused to listen to the inner voice which suggested that the bed was not made yet, it was not even paid for, and that he would be a fool to lie on it. He turned sad eyes on the little woman so flushed and eager over her packages. He had committed himself more deeply with every purchase they had made that day. How carefully he had laboured at his own destruction.
He had gone so far with these absurd reflections, that when Flossie exclaimed, "There, after all I've forgotten the kitchen hammer," his nerves relaxed their tension, and he experienced a sense of momentary but divine release. And when she insisted on repairing her oversight as they went back, he felt that the kitchen hammer had clinched the matter; and that if only they had not bought it he might yet be free.
There was something in the Beaver's building, after all.
Chapter LIX
He did not appear that evening, not even to listen to Lucia's music, for his misery was heavy upon him. Mercifully, he was able to forget it for a while in attending to the work that waited for him; an article for The Planet to be written; proofs to correct and manuscripts to look through for Metropolis; all neglected till the last possible moment, which moment had now come. For once he reaped the benefit of his reckless habits of postponement.
But four hours saw him through it; and midnight recalled him to his care. Instead of undressing he refilled his lamp, made up his fire, and drew his chair to the hearth. There was a question, put off, too, like his work, from hour to hour, and silenced by the scuffling, meaningless movements of the day. It related to the promise he had made to Lucia Harden at the end of their last interview. He had then said to her that, since she desired it, she should know what it was that she had done for him. Hitherto he had determined that she should not know it yet; not know it till death had removed from her his embarrassing, preposterous personality. The gift of knowledge that she might have refused from the man, she could then accept from the poet. The only condition that honour, that chivalry insisted on was the removal of the man. But there were other ways of getting rid of a man besides the clumsy device of death. Might he not be considered to have effaced himself sufficiently by marriage? As far as Lucia was concerned he could see very little difference between the two processes; in fact, marriage was, if anything, the safer. For the important thing was that she should know somehow; that he should hand over his gift to her before it was too late. And suppose--suppose he should fail to remove himself in time? Beholding the years as they now stretched before him, it seemed to him that he would never die.
There was another consideration which concerned his honour, not as a man but as a poet. He knew what it was in him to do. The nature of the gift was such that if he brought it to her to-day she would know that he had given her his best; if he kept it till to-morrow it would be his best no longer. Besides, it was only a gift when you looked at it one way. He was giving her (as he believed) an immortal thing; but its very immortality gave it a certain material value. The thing might be sold for much, and its price might go far towards covering that debt he owed her, or it might be held by her as a sort of security. He could see that his marriage would be a hindrance to speedy payment on any other system.
He rose, unlocked a drawer, and took from it the manuscript of the nine and twenty sonnets and the sealed envelope that contained his testament concerning them. He had looked at them but once since he had put them away three years ago, and that was on the night of his engagement. Looking at them again he knew he was not mistaken in his judgement, when calmly, surely, and persistently he had thought of the thing as immortal. But according to another condition that his honour had laid down, its immortality depended upon her. At this point honour itself raised the question whether it was fair to throw on her the burden of so great a decision? She might hesitate to deny him so large a part of his immortality, and yet object to being so intimately, so personally bound up with it. He could see her delicate conscience straining under the choice.
But surely she knew him well enough to know that he had left her free? She would know that he could accept nothing from her pity, not even a portion of his immortality. She would trust his sincerity; for that at any rate had never failed her. And since what he had written he had written, she would see that unless he destroyed it with his own hands the decision as to publication must rest with her. It concerned her so intimately, so personally, that it could not be given to the world without her consent. Whether what he had written should have been written was another matter. If she thought not, if her refinement accused him of a sin against good taste, that would only make his problem simpler. Even if her accusation remained unspoken, he would know it, he would see it, through whatever web her tenderness wrapped round it. His genius would contend against her judgement, would not yield a point to her opinion, but his honour would take it as settling the question of publication. In no case should she be able to say or think that he had used his genius as a cover for a cowardly passion, or that by compelling her admiration he had taken advantage of her pride.
But would she say it or think it? Not she. He knew her. And if his knowledge had brought much misery, it brought consolation too. Where Lucia was concerned he had never been sustained by any personal conceit; he had never walked vainly in the illusion of her love. At that supreme point his imagination had utterly broken down; he had never won from it a moment's respite from his intolerable lucidity. There was a certain dignity about his despair, in that of all the wonderful web of his dreams he had made no fine cloak to cover it. It shivered and suffered in a noble nakedness, absolutely unashamed. But one thing he knew also, that if Lucia did not love him, she loved his genius. Even when lucidity made suffering unendurable, he had still the assurance that his genius would never suffer at her hands. For did she not know that God gives the heart of a poet to be as fuel to his genius, for ever consumed and inconsumable? That of all his passions his love is the nearest akin to the divine fire? She of all women would never deny him the eternal right to utterance.
Neither could she well find fault with the manner of it. He went through the sonnets again, trying to read them with her woman's eyes. There was nothing, nothing, not an image, not a word that could offend. Here was no "flaming orgy of individuality." He had chosen purposely the consecrated form that pledged him to perfection, bound him to a magnificent restraint.
There still remained the scruple as to the propriety of choosing this precise moment for his gift. It was over-ridden by the invincible desire to give, the torturing curiosity to know how she would take it.
One more last scruple, easily disposed of. In all this there was no disloyalty to the woman he was going to make his wife. For the Sonnets belonged to the past in which she had no part, and to the future which concerned her even less.
The next day, then, at about five o'clock, the time at which Lucia had told him she would be free, he came to her, bringing his gift with him.
Lucia's face gladdened when she saw the manuscript in his hand; for though they had discussed very freely what he had done once, he had been rather sadly silent, she thought, as to what he was doing now. He had seemed to her anxious to avoid any question on the subject. She had wondered whether his genius had been much affected by his other work; and had been half afraid to ask lest she should learn that it was dead, destroyed by journalism. She had heard so much of the perils of that career, that she had begun to regret her part in helping him to it. So that her glance as it lighted on the gift was, he thought, propitious.
He drew up his chair near her (he had not to wait for any invitation to do that now), and she noticed the trembling of his hands as he spread the manuscript on his knees. He had always been nervous in approaching the subject of his poems, and she said to herself, "Has he not got over that?"
Apparently he had not got over it; for he sat there for several perceptible moments sunk in the low chair beside her, saying nothing, only curling and uncurling the sheets with the same nervous movement of his hand. She came to his help smiling.
"What is it? New poems?"
"No, I don't think I can call them new. I wrote them four or five years ago."
He saw that some of the gladness died out of her face, and he wondered why.
"Were you going to read them to me?"
"Good Heavens, no." He laughed the short laugh she had heard once or twice before that always sounded like a sob.
"I don't want to read them to you. I want to give them to you--"
"To read?" She held out her hand.
"Yes, to read, of course, but not now."
The hand was withdrawn, evidently with some distressing consciousness of its precipitancy.
"You said the other night that you would have been glad to know that you had done something for me; and somehow I believe you meant it."
"I did, indeed."
"If you read these things you will know. There's no other way in which I could tell you; for you will see that they are part of what you did for me."
"I don't understand."
"You will, though, when you've read them. That," he said meditatively, "is why I don't want you to read them now." But then it struck him that he had blundered, introducing a passionate personal revelation under the dangerous veil of mystery. He had not meant to say, "What you have done for me was to make me love you," but, "I have done a great thing, and what you did for me was to make me do it." For all that she should know, or he acknowledge, the passion was the means, not the end.
"I don't want to be cryptic, and perhaps I ought to explain a little. I meant that you'll see that they're the best things I've written, and that I should not have written them if it had not been for you. I don't know whether you'll forgive me for writing them, but I think you will. Because you'll understand that I had to."
"Have you published any of them?"
It seemed to him that the question was dictated by a sudden fear.
"Rather not. I want to talk to you about that later on, when you've read them."
"When will you want them back?"
"I don't want them back at all. I brought them for you to keep."
"To keep?"
"Yes, if you care for them."
"But this is the original manuscript?" She was most painfully aware of the value of the thing.
He smiled. "Yes, I couldn't give you a copy, because there isn't one."
"What a reckless person you are. I must make a copy, then, and keep that."
"That would spoil my pleasure and my gift, too. It's only valuable because it's unique."
"Whatever it is it's sure to be that."
"I don't mean in that way altogether--" he hesitated, for he had touched a part of his subject which had to be handled gently; and he was aware that in handling it at all he was courting rejection of the gift.
"And you are going to leave it with me now?"
"Yes."
She did not look up, but kept her eyes fixed on the sheets that lay in her lap, her hands lightly covering them. Was it possible that her finger-tips had caught the secret of the page beneath them and that their delicate nerves had already carried it to her brain? Was she considering what she was to do?
"You will see that one page is left blank; I couldn't fill it up till I knew whether you would accept the dedication."
"I?" She looked up. She was no doubt surprised; but he thought he could read something in her look that was deeper and sweeter than surprise.
"If you could, it would give me great pleasure. It's the only acknowledgement I can make for all your kindness."
"Please, please don't talk of my kindness."
"I won't. If it were any other book, it might be merely a question of acknowledgement, but this book belongs to you."
"Are you quite sure--" She was about to question his right to offer it, which was as good as questioning his honour, as good as assuming that--She paused, horrified as she realized what it was that she had almost assumed. Kitty had often told her that she erred through excess of subtlety. It wouldn't have mattered with anybody less subtle than Keith Rickman; but he would see it all. He did.
"Quite sure that I oughtn't to offer it to anybody else? I am quite sure. It was written four years ago, before--before I knew anybody else. It has nothing to do with anybody else, it couldn't have been dedicated to anybody else. If you don't accept it--"
"But I do." Her eagerness was the natural recoil from her hesitation. She was so anxious to atone for that shocking blunder she had made.
"I say, how you do take things on trust."
"Some things."
"But you mustn't. You can't accept the dedication of a book you haven't read. Do you know, now I come to think of it, you've always taken me on trust? Do you remember when first I came to you--it's more than five years ago--you took me on trust then?" (Their talk had a way of running to this refrain of 'Do you remember?') "Do you remember how you said,' I must risk it'?"
"Yes, I remember how I insisted on keeping you, and how very unwilling you were to be kept."
"Do you mind telling me what made you want to keep me? You didn't know me in the least, you know."
"I wanted to keep you because you didn't want to stay. I knew then that I could trust you. But I confess that most people might not have seen it in that way."
"Well, I can't let you take these sonnets on trust. For this time, your principle doesn't apply, you see. You can't say you're accepting this dedication because I don't want to give it to you." Though he laughed he rose and backed towards the door, suddenly anxious to be gone.
"Isn't it enough that I want to accept it?"
He shook his head, still backing, and at the door he paused to speak. "You've accepted nothing--as yet."
"Of course," she said to herself, "it would have been wiser to have read them first. But I can trust him."
But as she was about to read them a knock, a familiar knock at the door interrupted her. "Kitty!"
She laid the manuscript hastily aside, well out of Kitty's roving sight. She had noticed how his hands had trembled as he brought it; she did not notice that her own shook a little in thus putting it away from her.
Kitty Palliser, up in town for a week, had come less on her own account than as an impetuous ambassador from the now frantic Edith. She too was prepared to move heaven and earth, if only she could snatch her Lucy from Tavistock Place. But her anxiety was not wholly on Lucia's account, as presently appeared.
"How can you stand it for a minute?" said she.
"I'm standing it very well indeed."
"But what on earth do you find to do all day long, when," said Kitty severely, "you're not talking to young Rickman?"
"All day long I go out, or lie down and read, or talk to Sophie."
"And in the evenings?"
"In the evenings sometimes I make an old man happy by playing."
"And I expect you're making a young man unhappy by playing, too--a very dangerous game."
"Kitty, that young man is perfectly happy. He's going to be married."
"All the worse. Then you'll make a young woman unhappy as well. This little game would be dangerous enough with a man of your own set. It isn't fair to play it with him, Lucy, when you know the rules and he doesn't."
"I assure you, Kitty, he knows them as well as you or I do; better."
"I doubt it." Kitty's eyes roamed round the room (they had not lost their alert and hungry look) and they took in the situation at a glance. That move in the game would never have been made if he had known the rules. How could she let him make it?
"Really, Lucy, for a nice woman you do the queerest things."
"And, really, Kitty, for a clever woman, you say the stupidest. You're getting like Edith."
"I am not like Edith. I only say stupid things. She thinks them. What's more, in thinking them she only thinks of herself and her precious family. I'm thinking of you, dear, and"--Kitty's voice grew soft--"and of him. You ought to think of him a little too."
"I do think of him. I've been thinking of him all the time."
"I know you have. But don't let him suffer because of the insanely beautiful way you have of thinking."
There was a pause, in which it was evident to Kitty that Lucia was thinking deeply, and beautifully too.
"Have I made him suffer? I'm afraid I did once. He was valuable, and I damaged him."
"Yes; and ever since you've been trying to put him together again; in your own way, not his. That's fatal."
Lucia shook her head and followed her own train of thought. "Kitty, to be perfectly honest, I think--I'm not sure, but I think--from something he said to-day that you were right about him once. I mean about his beginning to care too much. I'm afraid it was so, at Harmouth, towards the end. But it isn't so any more. He tried to tell me just now. He did it beautifully; as if he knew that that would make me happier. At least I think that's what he meant. He didn't say much, but I'm sure he was thinking about his marriage."
"Heaven help his wife then--if he got as far as that. I suppose you take a beautiful view of her, too? Drop it, for goodness' sake, drop it."
"Not I. It would mean dropping him. It's all right, Kitty. You don't know the ways of poets."
"Perhaps not. But I know the ways of men."
Though Kitty had not accomplished her mission she so far prevailed that she carried her Lucy off to dinner.
It was somewhere towards midnight, when all the house was quiet, that Lucia first looked into Keith Rickman's sonnets. She had been led to expect something in the nature of a personal revelation, and the first sonnet struck the key-note, gave her the clue.
I asked the minist'ring priests who never tire In love's high service, who behold their bliss Through golden gloom of Love's dread mysteries, What heaven there be for earth's foregone desire?
And they kept silence. But the gentle choir Who sing Love's praises answered me, "There is No voice to speak of these deep sanctities, For Love hath sealed his servants' lips with fire."
Yet in his faithfulness put thou thy faith, Though he hath bound thee in the house of pain, And given thy body to the scourging years, And brought thee for thy thirst the drink of tears, That sorrowing thou shouldst serve him unto death; For when Love reigneth, all his saints shall reign.
She kindled and flamed, her whole being one inspired and burning sympathy. She knew what it was all about. She was on the track of a Poet's Progress in quest of the beloved Perfection, Beauty and Truth in one. Of those nine and twenty sonnets she looked for a score that should make immortal the moments of triumph and of vision, the moments of rapture and fulfilment of the heart's desire. Her glance fell now on two lines that clearly pointed to the goal of those who travel on the divine way--
--Elysian calm and passion with no stain Of mortal tears, no touch of mortal pain--
She hoped he had reached it. And more than that she hoped. She was ignorant of what his life had been before he knew her; but the Song of Confession had made her realize that besides this way where the poet went invincibly there was another where the man desired to go, where, as they were so ready to tell her, he had not always gone. But that was before she knew him. She hoped (taking her beautiful view) that in this gift of his he had meant to give to her who understood him some hint or sign that he had come near it also, the way of Righteousness. She looked to find many sonnets dealing with these secret matters of the soul. Therefore she approached them fearlessly, since she knew what they were all about. And since, in that curious humility of the man that went so oddly with the poet's pride, he had so exaggerated his obligation, taking, as he said, the will for the deed and making of her desire to serve him a service actually done; since his imagination had played round her for a moment as it played round all things, transforming, magnifying, glorifying, she might perhaps find one sonnet of dedication to her who had understood him.
But when she had read them all, she saw, and could not help seeing, that the whole nine and twenty were one continuous dedication--and to her. If she had found what she looked for, she found also that a revelation had been made to her of things even more sacred, more personal; a revelation that was in its way unique. He had hidden nothing, kept back nothing, not one moment of that three-weeks' passion (for so she dated it). It was all laid before her as it had been; all its immortal splendour, and all its mortal suffering and its shame. Not a line (if she could have stayed to think of that), not a word that could offend her taste or hurt her pride. The thing was perfect. She understood why it had been shown to her. She understood that he wanted to tell her that he had loved her. She understood that he never would have told her if it had not been all over. It was because it was all over that he had brought her this, to show her how great a thing she had done for him, she who thought she had done nothing. As she locked the sonnets away in a safe place for the night, in her heart there was a great pride and a still greater thankfulness and joy. Joy because it was all over, pride because it had once been, and thankfulness because it had been given her to know.
And in his room behind the wall that separated them the poet walked up and down, tortured by suspense; and said to himself over and over again, "I wonder how she'll take it."
Chapter LX
That was on a Thursday. It had been arranged earlier in the week that Flossie and he were to dine with Lucia on Friday evening. On Saturday and Sunday the Beaver would be let loose, and would claim him for her own. He could not hope to see Lucia alone before Monday evening; his suspense, then, would have to endure for the better part of four days. He had nothing to hope for from Friday evening. Lucia's manner was too perfect to afford any clue as to how she had taken it. If she were offended she would hardly let him see it before Flossie and Miss Roots. If she accepted, there again the occasion forbade her to give any sign to one of her guests that should exclude the other two. Still, it was just possible that he might gather something from her silence.
But as it happened, he had not even that to go upon. Never had Lucia been less silent than on Friday night. Not that she talked more than usual, but that all her looks, all her gestures spoke. They spoke of her pleasure in the happiness of her friend; of tenderness to the little woman whom he loved (so little and he so great); of love that embraced them both, the great and the little, a large, understanding love that was light and warmth in one. For Lucia believed firmly that she understood. She had always desired him to be happy, to be reconciled to the beautiful and glorious world; she had tried to bring about that reconciliation; and she conceived herself to have failed. And now because the thing had been done so beautifully, so perfectly (if a little unexpectedly), by somebody else, because she was relieved of all anxiety and responsibility, Lucia was rejoicing with all her heart.
He had not been five minutes in the room before he saw it all. Lucia believed that it was all over, and was letting herself go, carried away by the spectacle of a supreme and triumphal happiness. She triumphed too. Her eyes when they looked at him seemed to be saying, "Didn't I tell you so?"
He saw why they had been asked to dinner. The spirit of the bridal hour was upon her, and she had made a little feast to celebrate it. Like everything she did, it was simple and beautiful and exquisite of its kind. And yet it was not with that immaculate white linen cloth, spread on Keith's writing-table, strewn with slender green foliage and set out with delicate food and fruit and wine, nor with those white flowers, nor with those six shaded candles, that she had worked the joyous tender charm. These things, in her hands and in his eyes, became sacramental, symbolic of Lucia's soul with its pure thoughts and beautiful beliefs, its inspired and burning charities.
And the hero of this feast of happiness sat at her right hand, facing his little bride-elect, a miserable man consumed with anguish and remorse. He had never had so painful a sense of the pathos of his Beaver. For if anybody was happy it was she. Flossie was aware that it was her hour, and that high honour was being paid to her. Moreover, he could see for the moment that the worm had ceased to gnaw, and that she had become the almost affectionate thrall of the lady whose motto was Invictus. She had been forced (poor little girl) to anticipate her trousseau in order to attire herself fitly for the occasion, and was looking remarkably pretty in her way. She sat very upright, and all her demeanour was irreproachably modest, quiet and demure. Nothing could have been more correct than her smile, frequent, but so diminutive that it just lifted her upper lip and no more. No insight, no foreboding troubled her. Her face, soft and golden white in the candlelight, expressed a shy and delicate content. For Flossie was a little materialist through and through. Her smooth and over feminine body seemed to have grown smoother and more feminine still under the touch of pleasure; all that was hard and immobile in her melting in the sense of well-being.
It was not merely that Flossie was on her good behaviour. His imagination (in league with his conscience) suggested that the poor child, divinely protected by the righteousness of her cause, was inspired to confound his judgement of her, to give no vantage ground to his disloyalty, to throw him defenceless on his own remorse. Or was it Lucia who inspired her? Lucia, whose loving spirit could create the thing it loved, whose sweetness was of so fine and piercing a quality that what it touched it penetrated. He could not tell, but he thanked Heaven that at least for this hour which was hers the little thing was happy. He, for his part, by unprecedented acts of subterfuge and hypocrisy, endeavoured to conceal his agony.
Miss Roots alone divined it. Beyond looking festive in a black silk gown and a kind of white satin waistcoat, that clever lady took a strained and awkward part in the rejoicing. He was inclined to think that the waistcoat committed her to severity, until he became aware that she was watching him with a furtive sympathy in the clever eyes that saw through his pitiful play. How was it that Lucia, she who once understood him, could not divine him too?
From this estranging mood he was roused by the innocent laughter of the Beaver. He was aware of certain thin and melancholy sounds that floated up from some room below. They struggled with the noises of the street, overcame, and rose strident and triumphant to invade the feast. They seemed to him in perfect keeping with the misery and insanity of the hour.
It was Mr. Partridge playing on his flute.
Miss Roots looked at Lucia. "That's you, Lucy. You've been talking to him about that flute. I suppose you told him you would love to hear him play it?"
"No, Sophie, I didn't tell him that." But Lucy looked a little guilty. The flute rose as if in passionate protest against her denial. It seemed to say "You did! You know you did!"
"I only said it was a pity he'd given it up, and I meant it. But oh!" and Lucy put her hands up to her ears, "I don't mean it any more."
"That comes," said Rickman, "of taking things on trust."
She smiled and shook her head. It was her first approach to a sign of reassurance.
"That's the sort of thing she's always doing. It doesn't matter for you, Lucy. You won't have to stay on and hear him."
"I don't know. I think I shall stay on. You see, Mr. Rickman, I can't part with this pretty room."
"Do you like it?"
"I like it very much indeed. You're all coming to dine with me here again some day."
"And you must come and dine with us, Miss Harden, when we've got settled." It was Flossie who spoke.
"I shall be delighted."
He looked up, surprised. He could not have believed the Beaver could have done it so prettily. He had not even realized that it could be done at all. It never occurred to him that his marriage could bring him nearer to Lucia Harden. He looked kindly at the Beaver and blessed her for that thought. And then a thought bolder than the Beaver's came to him. "I hope," he said, "you'll do more than that. You must come and stay with us in the summer. You shall sit out in a deck-chair in the garden all day. That's the way to get strong."
Then he remembered that she could do that just as well in someone else's garden up at Hampstead, and he looked shy and anxious as he added, "Will you come?"
"Of course I'll come," said she.
He saw her going through the house at Ealing and sitting in the little green garden with the lilac bushes about her all in flower. And at the thought of her coming he was profoundly moved. His eyes moistened, and under the table his knees shook violently with the agitation of his nerves. Miss Roots gave one queer little glance at him and another at Flossie, and the moment passed.
And Lucia had not divined it. No, not for a moment, not even in the moment of leave-taking. She was still holding Flossie's hand in hers when her eyes met his, kind eyes that were still saying almost triumphantly, "I told you so."
As she dropped Flossie's hand for his, she answered the question that he had not dared to ask. "I've read them," she said, and there was no diminution in her glad look.
"When may I see you?"
"To-morrow, can you? Any time after four?"
Chapter LXI
He came into Lucia's presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself. And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.
Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-classic drama. Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day. Between Helen in Leuce and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul.
"Well," he said, glancing at the poems, as he seated himself. "What do you think of them? Am I forgiven? Do you consent?"
"So many questions? They're all answered, aren't they, if I say I consent?"
"And do you?" There was acute anxiety in his voice and eyes. It struck her as painful that the man, whom she was beginning to look on as possibly the greatest poet of his age, should think it necessary to plead to her for such a little thing.
"I do indeed."
"Without reservations?"
"What reservations should there be? Of course I could only be glad--and proud--that you should do me so much honour. If I can't say very much about it, don't think I don't feel it. I feel it more than I can say."
"Do you really mean it? I was afraid that it might offend you; or that you'd think I oughtn't to have written the things; or at any rate that I'd no business to show them to you. And as for the dedication, I couldn't tell how you'd feel about that."
And she, having before her eyes the greatness of his genius, was troubled by the humility and hesitation of his approach. It recalled to her the ways of his pathetic youth, his youth that obscurity made wild and shy and unassured.
"I can't tell either," she replied, "I don't know whether I ought to feel proud or humble about it; but I think I feel both. Your wanting to dedicate anything to me would have been enough to make me very proud. Even if it had been a little thing--but this thing is great. In some ways it seems to me the greatest thing you've done yet. I did think just at first that I ought perhaps to refuse because of that. And then I saw that, really, that was what made it easy for me to accept. It's so great that the dedication doesn't count."
"But it does count. It's the only thing that counts to me. You can't take it like that and separate it from the rest. Those sonnets would still be dedicated to you even if you refused to let me write your name before them. I want you to see that they are the dedication."
Lucia shook her head. She had seen it. She could see nothing else when she read them. How was it that the poet's bodily presence made her inclined to ignore the reference to herself; to take these poems dedicated to her as an event, not in her life or his, but in the history of literature?
"No," she said, "you must not look at them that way. If they were, it might be a reason for refusing. I know most people would think they'd less right to accept what wasn't really dedicated to them. But, you see, it's just because it isn't really dedicated to me that I can accept it."
"But it is--"
"No, not to me. You wouldn't be so great a poet if it were. I don't see myself here; but I see you, and your idea of me. It's--it's dedicated to that dream of yours. Didn't I tell you your dream was divorced from reality?"
"You told me it would be reconciled to it."
"And it is, isn't it? And the reality is worth all the dreams that ever were?"
He could have told her that so it appeared to those who are bound in the house of bondage; but that in Leuce, the country of deliverance, the dream and the reality are indivisible, being both divine. He could have told her that he had known as much five years ago; even before he knew her.
"After all," he said, "that's admitting that they are divided. And that, if you remember, was what I said, not what you said."
Lucia evaded the issue in a fashion truly feminine. "It doesn't matter a bit what either of us said then, so long as you know now."
"There's one thing I don't know. I don't know how you really take it; or whether you will really understand. Just now I thought you did, But after all it seems you don't. You think I'm only trying to pay you a stupid literary compliment. You think when I wrote those things I didn't mean them; my imagination was simply taking a rather more eccentric flight than usual. Isn't that so?"
"I'm certainly allowing for your imagination. I can't forget that you are a poet. You won't let me forget it. I can't separate your genius from the rest of you."
"And I can't separate the rest of me from it. That makes the difference, you see." He was angry as he said that. He had wondered whether she would deal as tenderly with his passion as she had dealt with his dream; and she had dealt just as tenderly. But it was because she identified the passion with the dream. He had not been prepared for that view of it; and somehow it annoyed him. But for that, he would never have spoken as he now did. "When I wondered how you would take it I thought it might possibly strike you as something rather too real, almost offensively so. Do you know, I'd rather you'd taken it that way than that you should talk about my dreams. My dreams." (It was shocking, the violent emphasis of disgust the poet, the dreamer, flung into that one word.) "As if I'd dreamed that I knew you. As if I'd dreamed that I cared for you. Would you rather think I dreamed it? You can if you like. Or would you rather think it was the most real thing that ever happened to me? So real that after it happened--because it happened--I left off being the sort of man and the sort of poet I was, and became another sort. So real and so strong that it saved me from one or two other things, uncommonly strong and real, that had got a pretty tight hold of me, too. Would you rather think that you'd really done this for me, or that I'd dreamed it all?"
She looked at his face, the unforgotten, unforgetable face, which when she first knew it had kindled and darkened so swiftly and inexplicably. She knew it now. She held the key of all its mysteries. It was the face that had turned to her five years ago with just that look; in the mouth and lifted chin that imperious impetuous determination to make her see; in the eyes that pathetic trust in her seeing. The same face; and yet it would have told her, if he had not, that he was another man. No, not another man; but of all the ways that were then open to him to take he had chosen the noblest. And so, of all the expressions that in its youth had played on that singularly expressive face, it was the finest only that had become dominant. That face had never lied to her. Why should he not plead for the sincerity of his passion, since it was all over now? Was it possible that there was some secret insincerity in her? How was it that she had made him think that she desired to ignore, to repudiate her part in him? That she preferred a meaningless compliment to the confession which was the highest honour that could be paid to any woman? Was it because the honour was so great that she was afraid to take it?
"Of course I would rather think it was really so."
"Then you must believe that I really cared for you; and that it is only because I cared that it is really so."
"I do believe it. But I can't take it all to myself. Another person might have cared just as much, and it might have done him harm--I would never have forgiven myself if I had done you harm--I want you to see that it wasn't anything in me; it was something in you that made the difference."
He smiled sadly. "You know it does sound as if you wanted to keep out of it."
"Does it? If I had really been in it, do you think that I wouldn't be glad and thankful? I am, even for the little that I have done. Even though I know another woman might have done as much, or more, I'm glad I was the one. But, you see, I didn't know I was in it at all. I didn't know the sort of help you wanted. Perhaps, if I had known, I couldn't have helped you. But my knowing or not knowing doesn't matter one bit. If I did help you--that way--I helped some one else too. At least I should like to think I did. I should like to think that one reason why you care for your wife so much is because you cared a little for me. There is that way of looking at it." Then, lest she should seem to be seeking some extraneous justification of a fact that in her heart she abhorred, she added, "Every way I look at it I'm glad. I'm glad that you cared. I'm glad because it's been, and glad because it's over. For if it hadn't been over--"
"What were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if it hadn't been over you couldn't have given me these. I didn't say it; because it would have sounded as if that were all I cared about. As if I wouldn't have been almost as glad if you'd never written a line of them. Only in that case I should never have known."
"No. You would never have known."
"I think I should have been glad, even if the poems had been--not very good poems."
"You wouldn't have known in that case either. I wouldn't have shown them to you if they had not been good. As it is, when I wrote them I never meant to show them to you."
"Oh, but I think--"
"Of course you do. But I wasn't going to print them before you'd seen them. Do you know what I'd meant to do with them--what in fact I did do with them? I left them to you in my will with directions that they weren't to be published without your consent. It seems a rather unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time they might be valuable. I don't know whether they would have sold for three thousand pounds--I admit it was a draft on posterity that posterity might have dishonoured--but I thought they might possibly go a little way towards paying my debt."
"Your debt? I don't understand." But the trembling of her mouth belied its words.
"Don't you? Don't you remember?"
"No, I don't. I never have remembered."
"Probably not. But you can hardly suppose that I've forgotten it."
"What has it to do with you, or me--or this?"
"Not much, perhaps; but still something, you'll admit."
"I admit nothing. I can't bear your ever having thought of it. I wish you hadn't told me. It spoils everything."
"Does it? Such a little thing? Surely a friend might be allowed to leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead? And it wasn't his fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?"
The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.
"But you see I didn't leave it. I didn't wait for that. I was afraid that my being dead would put you in a more embarrassing position than if I'd been alive. You might have hated those poems and yet you might have shrunk from suppressing them for fear of wounding the immortal vanity of a blessed spirit. Or you might have taken that horrid literary view I implored you not to take. You might have hesitated to inflict so great a loss on the literature of your country." He tried to speak lightly, as if it were merely a whimsical and extravagant notion that he should be reckoned among the poets. And yet in his heart he knew that it must be so. "But now the things can't be published unless you will accept them as they were originally meant. There's nothing gross about the transaction; nothing that need offend either you or me."
"I can't--I can't--"
"Well," he said gently, fearing the appearance of grossness in pressing the question, "we can settle that afterwards, can't we? Meanwhile at all events the publication rests with you."
"The publication has nothing whatever to do with me--The dedication, perhaps."
"You've accepted that. Still, you might object to your name appearing before the public with mine."
Lucia looked bewildered. She thought she had followed him in all his subtleties; but she had had difficulty in realizing that he was actually proposing to suppress his poems in deference to her scruples, if she had any. Some shadowy notion of his meaning was penetrating her now.
"My name," she said, "will mean nothing to the public."
"Then you consent?"
"Of course. It's absurd to talk about my consent. Besides, why should I mind now--when it is all over?"
He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was by an effort, as if he unwillingly obeyed some superior constraint. "If it hadn't been all over would you have minded then? Would you have refused your consent?"
"To your publishing your own poems? How could I?"
"To the dedication, I mean. If it hadn't been all over, would you have given your consent to that?"
His anxiety had deepened to an agony which seemed to have made his face grow sharp and thin almost as she looked at him. She judged that this question was vital, and that the truth was required of her.
"No, not to that. You see, it's only because it's all over that I've consented now."
"I see; that's the condition? You would never have consented but for that."
"Why should we talk about that now?"
"I wanted to know the truth."
"Why should you? It's a truth that has nothing to do with things as they are, only with things as they might have been. Isn't it enough to be glad that they weren't, that it is all over, and that this is the end of it?"
Even as she said the words it struck her that there was something ominous in this reiteration.
"But it isn't all over. This isn't the end of it."
His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the intense vibration of the tones. There was a pause in which they seemed still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the passionate pulse of sound.
"I didn't mean to tell you. I know you'd rather think it wasn't so. And I would have let you think it if it hadn't been for what you told me--what I made you tell me."
"I don't understand. What did I tell you?"
"You told me the truth." He spoke with a sudden savage energy. "How could I go on lying after that?"
She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes there was pain and a vague terror.
"I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it. But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one condition, and I know that I can't possibly fulfil the condition, what am I to do? Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for doing if you knew?"
Till now she had left the manuscript lying in her lap, where unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch. But as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an irresistible impulse of rejection. He knew that he was answered.
"If I had," he said, "in one sense I should have done you no wrong. All this would be nothing to the world which would read these poems. But when I knew that it made all the difference to you--"
She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, in reproach that was almost anger.
"To me? Do you suppose I'm thinking of myself?"
"Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known. What was I to do?"
She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.
"It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing."
He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.
"If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked."
"I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?"
"That is not what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me."
"For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth."
"But it isn't the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it is."
"And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?"
She did not answer. She only looked at him, as if by looking she could read the truth. For his face had never lied.
He persisted. "If it were true, what would you think of me?"
"I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so. But it isn't true."
He smiled. "Therefore it can't be dishonourable of me to say so."
"No, not that. You are not dishonourable; therefore it can't be true. Let us forget that you ever said it."
"But I can't forget that it's true any more than I can make it untrue. You think me dishonourable, because you think I've changed. But I haven't changed. It always was so, ever since I knew you; and that's more than five years ago now. I am dishonourable; but that's not where the dishonour comes in. The dishonourable thing would have been to have left off caring for you. But I never did leave off. There never was a minute when it wasn't true, nor a minute when I didn't think it. If I was sure of nothing else I was always sure of that. Where the dishonour came in was in caring for another woman, in another way."
"The dishonour would come in if you'd left off caring for her. And you haven't done that. It would come in a little now, I think, if you said that you didn't care. But you don't say it; you don't even think it. Shall I tell you the truth? You've let your genius get too strong a hold over you. You've let it get hold, too, of this feeling that you had for me. And now, though you know perfectly well--as well as I do--that it's all over, your genius is trying to persuade you that the feeling is still there when it isn't."
"That is not so, but you can say it is, if it makes you any happier."
"It does make me happier to think that it's your genius, not you, that says these things. For I can forgive your genius; but I couldn't have forgiven you."
At that moment he felt a savage jealousy of his genius, because she loved it. "And yet, you said a little while ago you couldn't separate the two."
"You have obliged me to separate them, to find an excuse for you. This ought not to have happened; but it could not have happened to a man who was not a poet."
All the time she was miserably aware that she was trying to defend herself with subtleties against the impact of a terrible reality. And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view.
But his subtlety was a match for hers. "Your cousin once did me the honour to say I was one-seventh part a poet, and upon my honour I prefer his estimate to yours."
"What is mine?"
"That I'm nothing but a poet. That there wasn't enough of me left over to make a man."
"That is not my estimate, and you know it. I think you so much a man that your heart will keep you right, even though your genius has led you very far astray."
"Is that all you know about it?"
"Well, I'm not sure that it is your genius, this time. I rather think it's your sense of honour. I believe you think that because you once cared for me you've got to go on caring, lest I should accuse you of being faithless to your dream." ("Surely," she said to herself, "I've made it easy for him now?")
But the word was too much for him. "For Goodness' sake don't talk to me any more about my dream. You may think any mortal thing you like about me, so long as you don't do that."
She smiled faintly, as if with an effort at forbearance. "Very well then, I won't talk about your dream. I'll say you were afraid lest I should think you had been faithless to me. It would never have occurred to you if you hadn't seen me again. It will not occur to you after I am gone. It will be all over by to-morrow."
"Why to-morrow?" He spoke stupidly. Fear had made him stupid. "Why to-morrow?"
"Because I am going to-morrow."
Then he knew that it was indeed all over. The door which had been open to him was about to close; and once closed it would never be open to him again.
"What must you think of me--"
"I think you have done very wrong, and that our talking about it only makes it worse. And so--I'm sorry--but I must ask you to leave me."
But he did not leave her. "And I must ask you to forgive me," he said gently.
"I? I have nothing to forgive. You haven't done anything to me. But I should never forgive you if I thought this foolishness could make one moment's difference to--to Flossie."
"It never has made any difference to her," he replied coldly, "or to my feeling for her. I never felt towards any woman as I feel towards you. It isn't the same thing at all. Heaven knows I thought I cared enough for her to marry her. But it seems I didn't. That's why I say it makes no difference to her. Nothing is altered by it. As far as Flossie is concerned, whether I marry her or not I shall have behaved abominably. I don't know which is the more dishonourable."
"Don't you?"
"No. I only know which I'm going to do."
She turned her head away. And that turning away was intolerable. It was the closing of the door.
"Is it so very terrible to you?" he said gently.
He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour--Lucia's honour.
"To me? I'm not thinking of myself--not of myself at all. How could I think of myself? I'm thinking of her." She turned to him and let her tears gather in her eyes unheeded. "Don't you see what you've done?"
Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done. He had taken the friendship she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands. All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion. He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour. And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise. The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing. Supposing he had suppressed both his passion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then? Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?
"Don't you see what you have done?" she said. "You've made me wish I had never come here and that I'd never seen you again. It was only the other night--the dear little girl--she came up here and sat with me, and we had a talk. We talked about you. She told me how she came to know you, and how good you'd been to her and how long it was before either of you knew. She told me things about herself. She is very shy--very reserved--but she let me see how much she cares--and how much you care. Think what you must be to her. She has no father and no mother, she has nobody but you. She told me that. And then--she took me up to her room and showed me all her pretty things. She was so happy--and how can I look at her again? She would hate me if she knew; and I couldn't blame her, poor child. She could never understand that it was not my fault."
But as she said it her conscience rose in contradiction and told her that it was her fault. Her fault in the very beginning for drawing him into an intimacy that his youth and inexperience made dangerous. Her fault for sacrificing, yes, sacrificing him to that impulse to give pleasure which had only meant giving pleasure to herself at his expense. Her fault for endlessly refining on the facts of life, till she lost all feeling of its simpler and more obvious issues. Kitty had been right when she told her that she treated men as if they were disembodied spirits. She had trusted too much to her own subtlety. That was how all her blunders, had been made. If she had been cold as well as subtle--but Lucia was capable of passionate indiscreet things to be followed by torments of her pride. Her pride had only made matters worse. It was her pride, in the beginning, that had blinded her. When she had told Kitty that she was not the sort of woman to let this sort of thing happen with this sort of man, she had summed up her abiding attitude to one particular possibility. She had trusted to the social gulf to keep her safe, apart. Afterwards, she knew that she had not trusted so much to the social gulf. She had not been quite so proud; neither, since Kitty had opened her eyes, had she been so blind; but she had been ten times more foolish. Her mind had refused to dwell upon Kitty's dreadful suggestions, because they were dreadful. Unconscious of her sex, she had remained unconscious of her power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman for protection. Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the passionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was left subtler and more pure. She had thought she could really deal with him now as a disembodied spirit. And so under the shelter of his engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.
These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.
She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me so unhappy?"
"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"
She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately denied.
"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."
He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat. She called him back, as she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of delivering a final stab. Only that this time she knew it was a stab; and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.
But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the manuscript, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.
"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them--or--or have anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if I'd taken what belonged to some one else."
As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.
But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood. "And yet," he murmured, "you say it isn't true."
She did not contradict him this time. And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.
Chapter LXII
After all, the wedding did not take place on the twenty-fifth; for on the twentieth Keith was summoned to Ilford by a letter from his stepmother. Mrs. Rickman said she thought he ought to know (as if Keith were seeking to avoid the knowledge!) that his father had had a slight paralytic seizure. He had recovered, but it had left him very unsettled and depressed. He kept on for ever worrying to see Keith. Mrs. Rickman hoped (not without a touch of asperity) that Keith would lose no time in coming, as his father seemed so uneasy in his mind.
Very uneasy in his mind was Isaac, as upstairs in the big front bedroom, (which from its excess of glass and mahogany bore a curious resemblance to the front shop,) he lay, a strangely shrunken figure in the great bed. His face, once so reticent and regular, was drawn on one side, twisted into an oblique expression of abandonment and agony.
Keith was not prepared for the change; and he broke down completely as the poor right hand (which Isaac would use) opened and closed in a vain effort to clasp his. But Isaac was intolerant of sympathy, and at once rebuked all reference to his illness. Above the wreck of his austere face, his eyes, blood-shot as they were and hooded under their slack lids, defied you to notice any change in him.
"I sent for you," he said, "because I wanted to talk over a little business." His utterance was thick and uncertain; the act of speech showed the swollen tongue struggling in the distorted mouth.
"Oh, don't bother about business now, father," said Keith, trying hard to steady his voice.
His father gave an irritable glance, as if he were repelling an accusation of mortality, conveyed in the word "now."
"And why not now as well as any other time?"
Keith blew his nose hard and turned away.
"What's the matter with you? Do you suppose I'm ill?"
"Oh no, of course not."
"No. I'm just lying here to rest and get up my strength again; God willing. But in case anything should happen to me, Keith, I want you to be clear as to how you stand."
"Oh, that's all right," said Keith cheerfully.
"It's not all right. It's not as I meant it to be. Between you and me, my big house hasn't come to much. I think if you'd stayed in it--well--we won't say any more about that. But Paternoster Row--now--that's sound. Mrs. Rickman always 'ad a fancy for the City 'ouse, and she's put money into it. You'll have your share that was settled on you when I married your poor mother. You stick to the City 'ouse, Keith, and it'll bring you in something some day. And the Name'll still go on." It was pathetic, his persistent clinging to the immortality of his name. Pathetic, too, his inability to see it otherwise than as blazoned for ever and ever over a shop-front. His son's fame (if he ever achieved it) was a mere subsidiary glory. "But Pilkington'll get the Strand 'ouse. Whatever I do I can't save it. I don't mind owning now, the Strand 'ouse was a mistake."
"A very great mistake."
"And Pilkington'll get the 'Arden library."
"You don't know. You may get rid of him--before that time."
Isaac seemed to be torn by his thoughts the more because they found no expression in his face that was bound, mouth, eye, and eyelid in its own agony. Before what time? Before the day of his death, or the day of redemption? "The mortgage," he said, "'as still three years to run. But I can't raise the money."
Keith was silent. He hardly liked to ask, though he would have given a great deal to know, the amount of the sum his father could not raise. A possibility, a splendid, undreamed of possibility, had risen up before him; but he turned away from it; it was infamous to entertain it, for it depended on his father's death. And yet for the life of him he could not help wondering whether the share which would ultimately come to him would by any chance cover that mortgage. To be any good it would have to come before the three years were up, though--He put the splendid horrible thought aside. He could not contemplate it. The wish was certainly not the father of that thought. But supposing the thought became the father of a wish?
"That reminds me," said Isaac, "that there was something else I 'ad to say to you."
He did not say it all at once. At the very thought of it his swollen tongue moved impotently without words. At last he got it out.
"I've been thinking it over--that affair of the library. And I've been led to see that what I did was wrong. Wrong, I mean, in the sight of God."
There was a sense he could not get rid of, in which it might still be considered superlatively right.
"And wot you did--"
"Oh, never mind what I did. That's all right."
"You did the righteous and the Christian thing."
"Did I? I'm sure I don't know why I did it."
"Ah--if you'd done it for the love of God, there's no doubt it'd 'ave been more pleasing to 'im."
"Well, you know I didn't do it for the love--of God."
"You did it for the love of woman? I was right then, after all."
Isaac felt inexpressibly consoled by Keith's cheerful disclaimer of all credit. His manner did away with the solemnity of the occasion; but it certainly smoothed for him the painful path of confession.
"Well, yes. If it hadn't been for Miss Harden I don't suppose I should have done it at all."
He said it very simply; but not all the magnificent consolations of religion could have given Isaac greater peace. It was a little more even, the balance of righteousness between him and Keith. He had never sinned, as Keith had done, after the flesh. Of the deeds done in the body he would have but a very small account to render at the last.
"And you see, you haven't got anything for it out of her."
There was a certain satisfaction in his tone. He saw a mark of the divine displeasure in Keith's failure to marry the woman he desired.
"And if I could only raise that money--"
He meant it--he meant it. The balance, held in God's hands, hung steady now.
"How much is it?" asked Keith; for he thought, "Perhaps he's only holding on to that share for my sake; and if he knew that I would give it up now, he might really--"
"Four thousand nine with th' interest," said Isaac.
"Do you think, Keith, it would have sold for five?"
"Well, yes, I think it very possibly might."
"Ah!" Isaac turned his face from his son. The sigh expressed a profound, an infinite repentance.
Chapter LXIII
On the twenty-fifth Isaac Rickman lay dead in his villa at Ilford. Two days after Keith's visit he had been seized by a second and more terrible paralytic stroke; and from it he did not recover. The wedding was now indefinitely postponed till such time as Keith could have succeeded in winding up his father's affairs.
They proved rather less involved than he had expected. Isaac had escaped dying insolvent. Though a heavy mortgage delivered Rickman's in the Strand into Pilkington's possession, the City house was not only sound, as Isaac had said, but in a fairly flourishing condition. Some blind but wholly salutary instinct had made him hold on to that humbler and obscurer shop where first his fortunes had been made; and with its immense patronage among the Nonconformist population Rickman's in the City held a high and honourable position in the trade. The bulk of the profits had to go to the bookseller's widow as chief owner of the capital; still, the slender partnership settled on his son, if preserved intact and carefully manipulated, would yield in time a very comfortable addition to Keith's income. If Isaac had lived, his affairs (as far as he was concerned) would have been easily settled. But for his son and heir they proved most seriously complicated.
For Keith was heir, not only to his father's estate, but to that very considerable debt of honour which Isaac had left unpaid. It seemed as if the Harden library, the symbol of a superb intellectual vanity, was doomed to be in eternal necessity of redemption. Until yesterday it had not occurred to Keith that it could be his destiny to redeem it. Yesterday he had refused to let his mind dally with that possibility; to-day it had become the most fitting subject of his contemplation.
The thing was more easily conceived than done. His literary income amounted, all told, to about three hundred and fifty a year, but its sources were not absolutely secure. Metropolis or The Planet might conceivably at any moment cease to be. And there was his marriage. It was put off; but only for a matter of weeks. He had only a hundred and fifty pounds in ready money; the rest had been swallowed up by the little house at Ealing. It was impossible to redeem the Harden library unless he parted with his patrimony; which was, after all, his only safe and imperishable source of income. Still, he had not the smallest hesitation on this head. Neither he nor Flossie had taken it into their calculations when they agreed to marry, and he was not going to consider it now.
The first step proved simple. Mrs. Rickman had no objection to buying him out. On the contrary, she was thankful to get rid of a most reckless and uncomfortable partner. But in the present state of the trade it was impossible to estimate his share at more than four thousand. That covered the principal; but Isaac had paid no interest for more than two years; and that interest Keith would have to pay. Though the four thousand was secure, and Pilkington had given him three years to raise the seven hundred and fifty in, it was not so easily done on an income of three hundred and fifty. Not easy in three years; and impossible in any number of years if he married. Possible only, yes, just possible, if his marriage were postponed until such time as he could have collected the money. Some brilliant stroke of luck might unexpectedly reduce the term; but three years must be allowed. Metropolis and The Planet were surely good for another three years. The other alternative, that of repudiating the obligation, never entered his head for an instant. He could not have touched a shilling of his father's money till this debt was cleared.
There could be no doubt as to what honour demanded of him. But how would Flossie take it? The worst of it was that he was bound (in honour again) to give her the option of breaking off their engagement, if she didn't care to wait. And after all that had passed between them it might not be so easy to persuade her that he was not glad of the excuse; for he himself was so lacking in conviction. Still she was very intelligent; and she would see that it wasn't his fault if their marriage had to be put off. The situation was inevitable and impersonal, and as such it was bound to be hard on somebody. He admitted that it was particularly hard on Flossie. It would have been harder still if Flossie had been out of work; but Flossie, with characteristic prudence, had held on to her post till the very eve of her wedding-day, and had contrived to return to it when she foresaw the necessity for delay. Otherwise he would have had to insist on providing for her until she was independent again; which would have complicated matters really most horribly. It was quite horrible enough to have to explain all this to Flossie. The last time he had explained things (for he had explained them) to Flossie the result had not been exactly happy. But then the things themselves had been very different, and he had had to admit with the utmost contrition that a woman could hardly have had more reasonable grounds for resentment. That was all over and done with now. In that explanation they had explained everything away. They had left no single thread of illusion hanging round the life they were to live together. They accepted themselves and each other as they were. And in the absence of any brighter prospect for either of them there was high wisdom in that acceptance.
If then there was a lack of rapture in his relations with Flossie, there would henceforth at any rate be calm. Her temperament was, he judged, essentially placid, not to say apathetic. There was a soft smoothness about the plump little lady that would be a security against friction. She was not great at understanding; but, taking it all together, she was now in an infinitely better position for understanding him than she had been two weeks ago. Besides, it was after all a simple question of figures; and Flossie's attitude to figures was, unlike his own, singularly uninfluenced by passion. She would take the sensible, practical view.
The sensible practical view was precisely what Flossie did take. But her capabilities of passion he had again misjudged.
He chose his moment with discretion, when time and place and Flossie's mood were most propitious. The time was Sunday evening, the place was the Regent's Park, Flossie's mood was gentle and demure. She had been very nice to him since his father's death, and had shown him many careful small attentions which, with his abiding sense of his own shortcomings towards her, he had found extremely touching. She seemed to him somehow a different woman, not perhaps so pretty as she had been, but nicer. He may have been the dupe of an illusory effect of toilette, for Flossie was in black. She had discussed the propriety of mourning with Miss Bishop, and wore it to-day for the first time with a pretty air of solemnity mingled with satisfaction in her own delicate intimation that she was one with her lover in his grief. She had not yet discovered that black was unbecoming to her, which would have been fatal to the mood.
The flowers were gay in the Broad Walk, Flossie tried to be gay too; and called on him to admire their beauty. They sat down together on a seat in the embrasure of a bed of chrysanthemums. Flossie was interested in everything, in the chrysanthemums, in the weather and in the passers-by--most particularly interested, he noticed, in the family groups. Her black eyes, that glanced so restlessly at the men and so jealously at the women, sank softly on the children, happy and appeased. Poor Flossie. He had long ago divined her heart. He did his best to please her; he sat down when she told him to sit down, stared when she told him to stare, and relapsed into his now habitual attitude of dejection. A little girl toddled past him in play; stopped at his knees and touched them with her hand and rubbed her small body against them, chuckling with delight.
"The dear little mite," said Flossie; "she's taken quite a fancy to you, Keith." Her face was soft and shy under her black veil, and when she looked at him she blushed. He turned his head away. He could not meet that look in Flossie's eyes when he thought of what he had to say to her. He was going to put the joy of life a little farther from her; to delay her woman's tender ineradicable hope.
This was not the moment or the place to do it in. They rose and walked on, turning into the open Park. And there, sitting under a solitary tree by the path that goes towards St. John's Wood, he broke it to her gently.
"Flossie," he said, "I've something to tell you that you mayn't like to hear."
She made no sign of agitation beyond scraping a worn place in the grass with the tips of her little shoes. "Well," she said, with an admirable attempt at patience, "what is it now?"
"You mean you think it's been about enough already?"
"If it's really anything unpleasant, for goodness' sake let's have it out and get it over."
"Right, Flossie. I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid we shan't be able to marry for another two years, perhaps three."
"And why not?" Her black eyes darted a vindictive look at him under her soft veil.
"My father's death has made a difference to me."
Her lips tightened, and she drew a sharp but inaudible breath through her nostrils. He had been wrong in supposing that she had not looked for any improvement in his finances after his father's death. On the contrary, knowing of their reconciliation and deceived by the imposing appearance of Rickman's in the Strand, she had counted on a very substantial increase of income.
"Do you mean to say, Keith, he hasn't left you anything?"
He laughed softly--an unpleasant way he had in situations where most people would consider it only decent to keep grave.
"He has left me something. A bad debt."
"What have you got to do with his bad debts? Nobody can come down on you to pay them." She paused. A horrible thought had struck her. "Can they? You don't mean to say they can?"
He shook his head and struggled with his monstrous mirth.
"Keith! What 'ave you done? You surely haven't been backing any bills?"
He laughed outright this time, for the sheer misery of the thing.
"No, oh dear me, no. Not in your sense at least."
"There isn't any other sense. Either you did or you didn't; and I think you might tell me which."
"It's not quite so simple, dear. I didn't back his bills, d'you see, but I backed him.'
"Can they make you responsible? Have they got it down in black and white?"
"Nobody can make me responsible, except myself. It's what they call a debt of honour, Flossie. Those debts are not always down in black and white."
"Why can't you speak plain? I really can't think what you mean by that."
"Can't you? I'll endeavour to explain. A debt of honour, Beaver dear, is a debt that's got to be paid whoever else goes unpaid."
"A fine lot of honour about that," said she.
Was it possible to make the Beaver understand? He, gave her a slight outline of the situation; and he really could not complain of any fault in the Beaver's intelligence. For, by dint of a masterly cross examination, she possessed herself of all the details, even of those which he most desired to keep from her. After their last great explanation there had been more than a tacit agreement between them that the name of Lucia Harden was never to come up again in any future discussion; and that name he would not give. She, however, readily inferred it from his silence.
"You needn't tell me the lady's name," said she.
"I certainly needn't. The name has nothing whatever to do with it.'"
"Oh, hasn't it? You'll not make me believe that you'd 'ave taken it up this way for any one but her."
"Whether I would or wouldn't doesn't affect the point of honour."
"I don't see where it comes in there."
"If you don't I can't make you see it."
"I said I didn't see where it comes in--there. I know what's honourable as well as you, though I daresay my notions wouldn't agree with yours."
"Upon my soul, I shouldn't wonder if they didn't!"
"Look here, Keith. Did you ever make Miss Harden any promise to pay her that money when your father died?"
"Of course I didn't--How could I? Do you suppose she'd have let me do anything of the sort?"
"I don't know what she wouldn't have let you do. Anyhow you didn't make her any promise. Think of the promises and promises you've made to me."
"I do think of them. Have I broken one of them?"
"I don't say you have yet; but you want to."
"I don't wa--I won't break them, I'll keep every one of the blessed lot, if you'll only give me time."
"Give you time? I know what that means. It means that I'm to go back and earn my living. I can slave till I drop for all you care--while you go and throw away all that money on another woman. And I'm to give you time to do it in!"
"I won't ask you to wait for me. I'm perfectly willing to release you from your engagement if you like. It seems only fair to you."
"You care a lot, don't you, about what's fair to me? I believe you'd take the bread out of my mouth to give it to her."
"I would, Flossie, if it was her bread. That money doesn't belong to you or me; it belongs to Miss Harden."
"It seems to me," said Flossie, "that everything belongs to her. I'm sure you've as good as told me so."
"I've certainly given you some right to think so. But that has nothing to do with it; and we agreed that we were going to let it alone, didn't we?"
"It wasn't me that brought it up again, it was you; and it's got everything to do with it. You wouldn't have behaved like this, and you wouldn't be sitting there talking about what's honourable, if it hadn't been for Miss Harden."
"That may very well be. But it doesn't mean what you think it does. It means that before I knew Miss Harden I didn't know or care very much about what's honourable. She taught me to care. I wasn't fit to speak to a decent woman before I knew her. She made me decent."
"Did she sit up half the night with you to do it?".
He made a gesture of miserable impatience.
"You needn't tell me. I can see her."
"You can't. She did it by simply being what she is. If I ever manage to do anything right it will be because of her, as you say. But it doesn't follow that it'll be for her. There's a great difference."
"I don't see it."
"You must try to see it. There's one thing I haven't told you about that confounded money. It was I who let her in for losing it. Isn't that enough to make me keen?"
"You always were keen where she was concerned."
"Look here, Flossie, I thought you were going to give up this sort of thing?"
"So I was when I thought you were going to give her up. It doesn't look like it."
"My dear child, how can I give up what I never had or could have?"
"Well then--are you going to give up your idea?"
"No, I am not. But you can either give me up or wait for me, as I said. But if you marry me, you must marry me and my idea too. You don't like my idea; but that's no reason why you shouldn't like me."
"You're not taking much pains to make me like you."
"I'm taking all the pains I know. But your liking or not liking me won't alter me a little bit. You'll have to take me as I am."
As she looked up at him she realized at last the indomitable nature of the man she had to deal with. And yet he was not unalterable, even on his own showing. She knew some one who had altered him out of all knowledge.
"Come," said she, "don't say you never change."
"I don't say it. You'll have to allow for that possibility, too."
"It seems to me I have to allow for a good many things."
"You have indeed."
"Well, are we going to sit here all night?"
"I'm ready."
They walked back in silence over the straight path that seemed as if it would never end. Flossie stopped half-way in it, stung by an idea.
"There's something you haven't thought of. What are you going to do with the house? And with all that furniture?"
"Let them to somebody. That's all right, Beaver. The house and the furniture can't run away."
"No, but they'll never be the same again."
Nothing would ever be the same again; that was clear. The flowers were still gay in the Broad Walk, and the children, though a little sleepier, were still adorable; but Flossie did not turn to look at them as she passed. Would she ever look at them, at anything, with pleasure again? He had made life very difficult, very cruel to this poor child, whom after all he had promised to protect and care for.
"I say, Beaver dear, it is hard luck on you."
The look and the tone would have softened most women, at least for the time being; but the Beaver remained implacable.
"I'll try to make it easier for you. I'll work like mad. I'll do anything to shorten the time."
"Shorten the time? You don't know how many years you're asking me to wait."
"I'm not asking you to wait. I'm asking you to choose."
"Do you want me to do it now?"
"No, certainly not." She was not indeed in a mood favourable to choice; and he would not influence her decision. It was mean to urge her to an arduous constancy; meaner still to precipitate her refusal. "You must think. You can, you know, when you give your mind to it."
She appeared to be giving her mind to it for the rest of the way home; and her silence left him also free to think it over. After all, what had he done? He had not asked her to wait, but what if he had? Many men have to ask as much of the woman who loves them. Some men have asked even more of the woman whom they love. That was the secret. He could have asked it with a clear conscience if he had but loved her.
Chapter LXIV
Flossie was in no hurry about making up her mind. If Keith had asked her to give him time, it was only fair that he should give her time too, and since his mind was made up in any case, time could be no object to him. So days and weeks had passed on and she had conveyed to him no hint of her decision.
On that Sunday evening, in the seclusion of her bedroom, Flossie said to herself that she had made one great mistake. Prudence and foresight were all very well in their way, but this time she had blundered through excess of caution. In sticking to the post that made her independent she had broken her strongest line of defence. If only she had had the courage to relinquish it at the crucial moment, she would have stood a very much better chance in her contest with Keith. She could then have appealed to his pity as she had done with such signal success two years ago, when the result of the appeal had been to bring him violently to the point. She was wise enough to know that in contending with a chivalrous man a woman's strongest defence is her defencelessness. Though she was unable to believe that pure abstract honour was or could be the sole and supreme motive of Keith's behaviour, she felt that if she could have said to him, "I've thrown up a good situation to marry you," his chivalry would not have held out against that argument.
But Flossie never made mistakes. She was too consummate a diplomatist. Therefore, though appearances were against her, it was only reasonable to suppose that she had not really done so now, and that her original inspiration had been right. It was foresight so subtle, so advanced, that it outstripped the ordinary processes of calculation, and appeared afterwards as the mysterious leading of a profounder power, of the under-soul that presses the innocent intellect into the services of its own elemental instincts. The people who yield most obediently to this compulsion are said to have good luck.
Flossie's good luck, however, was not yet apparent either to herself or to her fellow-boarders at Tavistock Place. Not that she had enlarged on her trouble to any of them. The whole thing had been too profoundly humiliating for that. To say nothing of being engaged to a man who had shown so very little impatience to marry her, to have taken and furnished a house and be unable to live in it, to have received congratulations and wedding presents which had all proved premature, to know, and feel that everybody else knew, that her bedroom was at this moment lumbered up with a trousseau which, whether she wore it or put it by two years, would make her equally ridiculous, was really a very trying position for any young lady, and to Flossie, whose nature was most delicately sensitive to such considerations, it was torture. But, after all, these things were material and external; and the worst of Flossie's suffering was in her soul. Before the appearance of Miss Harden, the last two years had passed for Flossie in gorgeous triumphal procession through the boarding-house. She had been the invincible heroine of Mrs. Downey's for two years, she had dragged its young hero at her chariot wheels for two years, she had filled the heart of Ada Bishop with envy and the hearts of Mr. Soper and Mr. Spinks with jealousy and anguish for two years; and now she had all these people pitying her and looking down on her because she had been so queerly treated; and this was even more intolerable to poor Flossie. She knew perfectly well what every one of them was saying. She knew that Ada Bishop had thanked Goodness she wasn't in her shoes; that Miss Bramble spoke of her persistently as "that poor young thing"; that Mrs. Downey didn't know which she pitied most, her or poor Mr. Rickman. He was poor Mr. Rickman, if you please, because he was considered to have entangled himself so inextricably with her. She knew that Miss Roots maintained that it was all her (Flossie's) own fault for holding Keith to his engagement; that Mr. Partridge had wondered why girls were in such a hurry to get married; and that Mr. Soper said she'd made a great mistake in ever taking up with a young fellow you could depend on with so little certainty. And the burden of it all was that Flossie had made a fool of herself and been made a fool of. So she was very bitter in her little heart against the man who was the cause of it all; and if she did not instantly throw Keith Rickman over, that was because Flossie was not really such a fool as for the moment she had been made to look.
But there was one person of the boarding-house whose opinion was as yet unknown to Flossie or to anybody else; it was doubtful indeed if it was known altogether to himself; for Mr. Spinks conceived that honour bound him to a superb reticence on the subject. He had followed with breathless anxiety every turn in the love affairs of Flossie and his friend. He could not deny that a base and secret exultation had possessed him on the amazing advent of Miss Harden; for love had made him preternaturally keen, and he was visited with mysterious intimations of the truth. He did not encourage these visitings. He had tried hard to persuade himself that he was glad for Flossie's sake when Miss Harden went away; when, whatever there had been between Rickets and the lady, it had come to nothing; when the wedding day remained fixed, immovably fixed. But he had not been glad at all. On the contrary he had suffered horribly, and had felt the subsequent delay as a cruel prolongation of his agony. In the irony of destiny, shortly before the fatal twenty-fifth, Mr. Spinks had been made partner in his uncle's business, and was now enjoying an income superior to Rickman's not only in amount but in security. If anything could have added to his dejection it was that. His one consolation hitherto had been that after all, if Rickman did marry Flossie, as he was not in a position to marry her, it came to the same thing in the long run. Now he saw himself cut off from that source of comfort by a solid four hundred a year with prospects of a rise. He could forego the obviously impossible; but in that rosy dawn of incarnation his dream appeared more than ever desirable. Whenever Mr. Spinks's imagination encountered the idea of marriage it had tried to look another way. Marriage remote and unattainable left Mr. Spinks's imagination in comparative peace; but brought within the bounds of possibility its appeal was simply maddening. And now, bringing it nearer still, so near that it was impossible to look another way, there came these disturbing suggestions of a misunderstanding between Rickman and his Beaver. The boarding-house knew nothing but that the wedding was put off because Rickman was in difficulties and could not afford to marry at the moment. Spinks would have accepted this explanation as sufficient if it had not been for the peculiar behaviour of Rickman, and the very mysterious and agitating change in Flossie's manner. Old Rickets had returned to his awful solitude. He absented himself entirely from the dinner-table. When you met him on the stairs he was incommunicative and gloomy; and whatever you asked him to do he was too busy to do it. His sole attention to poor Flossie was to take her for an occasional airing in the Park on Sunday afternoons. Spinks had come across them there walking sadly side by side. Flossie for propriety's sake would be making a little conversation as he went by; but Rickman had always the shut mouth and steady eyes of invincible determination.
What was it that Razors was so determined about? To marry Flossie? Or not to marry her? That was the question which agitated poor Spinks from morning till night, or rather from night till morning. The worst of it was that the very nature of his woes compelled him as an honourable person to keep them to himself.
But there was no secret which could be long concealed from the eyes of that clever lady, Miss Roots; and she had contrived in the most delicate manner to convey to the unfortunate youth that he had her sympathy. Spinks, bound by his honour, had used no words in divulging his agony; but their unspoken confidences had gone so far that Miss Roots at last permitted herself to say that it might be as well to find out whether "it was on or off."
"But," said the miserable Spinks, "would that be fair to Rickman?"
"I think so," said the lady, with a smile that would have been sweet had it been rather less astute. "Mind you, I'm not in their secrets; but I believe you really needn't be afraid of that."
"Yes. But how in Heaven's name am I to find out? I can't ask him, and I can't ask her."
"Why can't you ask them?"
Spinks was unable to say why; but his delicacy shrank from either course as in some subtle way unfair. Besides he distrusted Miss Roots's counsel, for she had not been nice to Flossie.
"Oh Lord," said Spinks, "what an orful mess I'm in!" He said it to himself; for he had resolved to talk no longer to Miss Roots.
He could have borne it better had not the terrible preoccupation of Rickman thrown Flossie on his hands. In common decency he had to talk to her at the dinner-table. But it was chivalry (surely) that drew him to her in the drawing-room afterwards. She had to be protected (poor Flossie) from the shrewdness of Miss Roots, the impertinence of Mr. Soper, and the painful sympathy of the other boarders. With the very best and noblest intentions in the world, Mr. Spinks descended nightly into that atmosphere of gloom, and there let loose his imperishable hilarity.
He was quite safe, he knew, as long as their relations could be kept upon a purely hilarious footing; but Flossie's manner intimated (what it had never intimated before) that she now realized and preferred the serious side of him; and there was no way by which the humorous Spinks was more profoundly flattered than in being taken seriously. Some nights they had the drawing-room to themselves but for the harmless presence of Mr. Partridge dozing in his chair; and then, to see Flossie struggling to keep a polite little smile hovering on a mouth too tiny to support it; to see her give up the effort and suddenly become grave; to see her turn away to hide her gravity with all the precautions another woman takes to conceal her merriment; to see her sitting there, absolutely unmoved by the diverting behaviour of Mr. Partridge in his slumber, was profoundly agitating to Mr. Spinks.
"I'm sure," said Flossie one night (it was nearly three weeks after the scene with Rickman in the Park), "I'm sure I don't know why we're laughing so much. There's nothing to laugh at that I can see."
Spinks could have have replied in Byron's fashion that if he laughed 'twas that he might not weep, but he restrained himself; and all he said was, "I like to see you larf."
"Well, you can't say you've ever seen me cry."
"No, I haven't. I shouldn't like to see that, Flossie. And I shouldn't like to be the one that made you."
"Wouldn't you?" Flossie put her pocket handkerchief to her little nose, and under the corner of it there peeped the tail-end of a lurking smile.
"No," said Spinks simply, "I wouldn't." He was thinking of Miss Roots. The theory of Rickman's bad behaviour had never entered his head. "What's more, I don't think any nice person would do it."
"Don't you?"
"No. Not any really nice person."
"It's generally," said Flossie, sweetly meditative, "the nicest person you know who can make you cry most. Not that I'm crying."
"No. But I can see that somebody's been annoying you, and I think I can guess pretty well who it is, too. Nothing would please me more than to 'ave five minutes' private conversation with that person." He was thinking of Miss Harden now.
"You mustn't dream of it. It wouldn't do, you know; it really wouldn't. Look here, promise me you'll never say a word."
"Well it's safe enough to promise. There aren't many opportunities of meeting."
"No, that's the worst of it, there aren't now. Still, you might meet him any minute on the stairs, or anywhere. And if you go saying things you'll only make him angry."
"Oh it's a him, is it?" (Now he was thinking of Soper.) "I know. Don't say Soper's been making himself unpleasant."
"He's always unpleasant."
"Is he? By 'Eaven, if I catch him!"
"Do be quiet. It isn't Mr. Soper."
"Isn't it?"
"No. How could it be? You don't call Mr. Soper nice, do you?"
Spinks was really quiet for a moment. "I say, Flossie, have you and Rickets been 'aving a bit of a tiff?"
"What do you want to know that for? It's nothing to you."
"Well, it isn't just my curiosity. It's because I might be able to help you, Floss, if you didn't mind telling me what it was. I'm not a clever fellow, but there's no one in this house understands old Razors as well as I do."
"Then you must be pretty sharp, for I can't understand him at all. Has he been saying anything to you?"
"Oh no, he wouldn't say anything. You don't talk about these things, you know."
"I thought he might--to you."
"Me? I'm the very last person he'd dream of talking to."
"I thought you were such friends."
"So we are. But you see he never talks about you to me, Flossie."
"Why ever not?"
"That's why. Because we're friends. Because he wouldn't think it fair--"
"Fair to who?"
"To me, of course."
"Why shouldn't it be fair to you?" Her eyes, close-lidded, were fixed upon the floor. As long as she looked at him Spinks held himself well in hand; but the sudden withdrawing of those dangerous weapons threw him off his guard.
"Because he knows I--Oh hang it all, that's what I swore I wouldn't say."
"You haven't said it."
"No, but I've made you see it."
His handsome face stiffened with horror at his stupidity. To let fall the slightest hint of his feeling was, he felt, the last disloyalty to Rickman. He had a vague idea that he ought instantly to go. But instead of going he sat there, silent, fixing on his own enormity a mental stare so concentrated that it would have drawn Flossie's attention to it, if she had not seen it all the time.
"If there's anything to see," said she, "there's no reason why I shouldn't see it."
"P'raps not. There's every reason, though, why I should have held my silly tongue."
"Why, what difference does it make?"
"It doesn't make any difference to you, of course, and it can't make any difference--really--to him; but it's a downright dishonourable thing to do, and that makes a jolly lot of difference to me. You see, I haven't any business to go and feel like this."
"Oh well, you can't help your feelings, can you?" she said softly. "Anybody may have feelings--"
"Yes, but a decent chap, you know, wouldn't let on that he had any--at least, not when the girl he--he--you know what I mean, it's what I mustn't say--when she and the other fellow weren't hitting it off very well together."
"Oh, you think it might make a difference then?"
"No, I don't--not reelly. It's only the feeling I have about it, don't you see. It seems somehow so orf'ly mean. Razors wouldn't have done it if it had been me, you know."
"But it couldn't have been you."
"Of course it couldn't," said the miserable Spinks with a weak spurt of anger; "that was only my way of putting it."
"What are you driving at? What ever did you think I said?"
"Never mind what you said. You're making me talk about it, and I said I wouldn't."
"When did you say that?"
"Ages ago--when Rickets first told me you--and he--"
"Oh that? That was so long ago that it doesn't matter much now."
"Oh, doesn't it though, it matters a jolly sight more. You said" (there was bitterness in his tone), "you said it couldn't have been me. As if I didn't know that."
"I didn't mean it couldn't have been you, not in that way. I only meant that you'd have--well, you'd have behaved very differently, if it had been you; and so I believe you would."
"You don't know how I'd 'ave behaved."
"I've a pretty good idea, though." She looked straight at him this time, and he grew strangely brave.
"Look here, Flossie," he said solemnly, "you know--as I've just let it out--that I'm most orf'ly gone on you. I don't suppose there's anything I wouldn't do for you except--well, I really don't know what you're driving at, but if it's anything to do with Razors, I'd rather not hear about it, if you don't mind. It isn't fair, really. You see, it's putting me in such a 'orribly delicate position."
"I don't think you're very kind, Sidney. You don't think of me, or what sort of a position you put me in. I'm sure I wouldn't have said a word, only you asked me to tell you all about it; you needn't say you didn't."
"That was when I thought, p'raps, I could help you to patch it up. But if I can't, it's another matter."
"Patch it up? Do you think I'd let you try? I don't believe in patching things up, once they're--broken off."
"I say Flossie, it hasn't come to that?"
"It couldn't come to anything else, the way it was going."
"Oh Lord"--Spinks buried a crimson face in his hands. If only he hadn't felt such a horrible exultation!
"I thought you knew. Isn't that what we've been talking about all the time?"
"I didn't understand. I only thought--he didn't tell me, mind you--I thought it was just put off because he couldn't afford to marry quite so soon."
"Don't you think three hundred a year is enough to marry on?"
"Well, I shouldn't care to marry on that myself; not if it wasn't regular. He's quite right, Flossie. You see, a man hasn't got only his wife to think of."
"No--I suppose he must think of himself a little too."
"Oh well, no; if he's a decent chap, he thinks of his children."
Flossie's face was crimson, too, while her thoughts flew to that unfurnished room in the brown house at Ealing. She was losing sight of Keith Rickman; for behind Keith Rickman there was Sidney Spinks; and behind Sidney Spinks there was the indomitable Dream. She did not look at Spinks, therefore, but gazed steadily at the top of Mr. Partridge's head. With one word Spinks had destroyed the effect he had calculated on from his honourable reticence. Perhaps it was because Flossie's thoughts had flown so far that her voice seemed to come from somewhere a long way off, too.
"What would you think enough to marry on, then?"
"Well, I shouldn't care to do it much under four hundred myself," he said guardedly.
"And I suppose if you hadn't it you'd expect a girl to wait for you any time until you'd made it?"
"Well of course I should, if we were engaged already. But I shouldn't ask any girl to marry me unless I could afford to keep her--"
"You wouldn't ask, but--"
"No, and I wouldn't let on that I cared for her either. I wouldn't let on under four hundred--certain."
"Oh," said Flossie very quietly. And Spinks was crushed under a sense of fresh disloyalty to Rickman. His defence of Rickman had been made to turn into a pleading for himself. "But Razors is different; he'll be making twice that in no time, you'll see. I shouldn't be afraid to ask any one if I was him."
Vainly the honourable youth sought to hide his splendour; Flossie had drawn from him all she needed now to know.
"Look, here, Floss, you say it's broken off. Would you mind telling me was it you--or was it he who did it?" His tone expressed acute anxiety on this point, for in poor Spinks's code of honour it made all the difference. But he felt that his question was clearly answered, for the silence of Razors argued sufficiently that it was he.
"Well," said Flossie with a touch of maidenly dignity, "whichever it was, it wasn't likely to be Keith."
Spinks's face would have fallen, but for its immense surprise. In this case Rickman ought, yes, he certainly ought to have told him. It wasn't behaving quite straight, he considered, to keep it from the man who had the best right in the world to know, a fellow who had always acted straight with him. But perhaps, poor chap, he was only waiting a little on the chance of the Beaver changing her mind.
"Don't you think, Flossie, that if he tried hard he could bring it on again?"
"No, he couldn't. Never. Not if he tried from now till next year. Not if he went on his bended knees to me."
Spinks reflected that Rickman's knees didn't take kindly to bending. "Haven't you been a little, just a little hard on him? He's such a sensitive little chap. If I was a woman I don't think I could let him go like that. You might let him have another try."
Poor Spinks was so earnest, so sincere, so unaffectedly determined not to take advantage of the situation, that it dawned on Flossie that dignity must now yield a little to diplomacy. She was not making the best possible case for herself by representing the rupture as one-sided. "To tell you the truth, Sidney, he doesn't want to try. We've agreed about it. We've both of us found we'd made a great mistake--".
"I wish I could be as sure of that."
"Why, what difference could it make to you?" said Flossie, turning on him the large eyes of innocence, eyes so dark, so deep, that her thoughts were lost in them.
"It would make all the difference in the world, if I knew you weren't making a lot bigger mistake now." He rose, "I think, if you don't mind, I'll 'ave a few words with Rickets, after all. I think I'll go up and see him now."
There was no change in the expression of her eyes, but her eyelids quivered. "No, Sidney, don't. For Goodness' sake don't go and say anything."
"I'm not going to say anything. I only want to know--"
"I've told you everything--everything I can."
"Yes; but it's what you can't tell me that I want to know."
"Well, but do wait a bit. Don't you speak to him before I see him. Because I don't want him to think I've given him away."
"I'll take good care he doesn't think that, Flossie. But I'm going to get this off my mind to-night."
"Well then, you must just take him a message from me. Say, I've thought it over and that I've told you everything. Don't forget. I've told you everything, say. Mind you tell him that before you begin about anything else. Then he'll understand."
"All right. I'll tell him."
Her eyes followed him dubiously as he stumbled over Mr. Partridge's legs in his excited crossing of the room. She was by no means sure of her ambassador's discretion. His heart would make no blunder; but could she trust his head?
Up to this point Flossie had played her game with admirable skill. She had, without showing one card of her own, caused Spinks to reveal his entire hand. It was not until she had drawn from him the assurance of his imperishable devotion, together with the exact amount of his equally imperishable income, that she had committed herself to a really decisive move. She was perfectly well aware of its delicacy and danger. Not for worlds would she have had Spinks guess that Rickman was still waiting for her decision. And yet, if Spinks referred rashly and without any preparation to the breaking off of the engagement, Rickman's natural reply would be that this was the first he had heard of it. Therefore did she so manoeuvre and contrive as to make Rickman suppose that Spinks was the accredited bearer of her ultimatum, while Spinks himself remained unaware that he was conveying the first intimation of it. It was an exceedingly risky thing to do. But Flossie, playing for high stakes, had calculated her risk to a nicety. She must make up her mind to lose something. As the game now stood the moral approbation of Spinks was more valuable to her than the moral approbation of Rickman; and in venturing this final move she had reckoned that the moral approbation of Rickman was all she had to lose. Unless, of course, he chose to give her away.
But Rickman could be trusted not to give her away.
When Spinks presented himself in Rickman's study he obtained admission in spite of the lateness of the hour. The youth's solemn agitation was not to be gainsaid. He first of all delivered himself of Flossie's message, faithfully, word for word.
"Oh, so she's told you everything, has she? And what did she tell you?"
"Why, that it was all over between you, broken off, you know."
"And you've come to me to know if it's true, is that it?"
"Well no, why should I? Of course it's true if she says so."
Rickman reflected for a moment; the situation, he perceived, was delicate in the extreme, delicate beyond his power to deal with it. But the god did not forsake his own, and inspiration came to him.
"You're right there, Spinky. Of course it's true if she says so."
"She seemed to think you wouldn't mind her telling me. She said you'd understand."
"Oh yes, I think I understand. Did she tell you she had broken it off?" (He was really anxious to know how she had put it.)
"Yes, but she was most awfully nice about it. I made out--I mean she gave me the impression--that she did it, well, partly because she thought you wanted it off. But that's just what I want to be sure about. Do you want it off, or don't you?"
"Is that what she wants to know?"
"No. It's what I want to know. What's more, Rickets, I think I've got a fair right to know it, too."
"What do you want me to say? That I don't want to marry Miss Walker or that I do?"
Spinks's face flushed with the rosy dawn of an idea. It was possible that Rickets didn't want to marry her, that he was in need of protection, of deliverance. There was a great deed that he, Spinks, could do for Rickets. His eyes grew solemn as they beheld his destiny.
"Look here," said he, "I want you to tell me nothing but the bally truth. It's the least you can do under the circumstances. I don't want it for her, well--yes I do--but I want it for myself, too."
"All right, Spinky, you shall have the best truth I can give you at such uncommonly short notice. I can't say I don't want to marry Miss Walker, because that wouldn't be very polite to the lady. But I can say I think she's shown most admirable judgement, and that I'm perfectly satisfied with her decision. I wouldn't have her go back, on it for worlds. Will that satisfy you?"
"It would if I thought you really meant it."
"I do mean it, God forgive me. But that isn't her fault, poor little girl. The whole thing was the most infernal muddle and mistake."
"Ah--that was what she called it--a mistake." Spinks seemed to be clinging to and cherishing this word of charm.
"I'm glad for her sake that she found it out in time. I'm not the sort of man a girl like Flossie ought to marry. I ought never to have asked her."
"Upon my soul, Rickets, I believe you're right there. That's not saying anything against you, or against her either."
"No. Certainly not against her. She's all right, Spinky--"
"I know, I know."
Still Spinks hesitated, restraining his ardent embrace of the truth presented to him, held back by some scruple of shy unbelieving modesty.
"Then you think, you really do think, that there isn't any reason why I shouldn't cut in?"
"No, Heaven bless you; no reason in the world, as far as I'm concerned. For God's sake cut in and win; the sooner the better. Now, this minute, if you feel like it."
But still he lingered, for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated the master's manner.
"I say, I don't know what you'll think of me. I said I'd never let on to Flossie that I cared; and I didn't mean to, I didn't on my word. I don't know how it happened; but to-night we got talking--to tell you the truth I thought I was doing my best to get her to make it up with you--"
"Thanks; that was kind," said Rickman in a queer voice which put Spinks off a bit.
"I was really, Razors. I do believe I'd have died rather than let her know how I felt about her; but before I could say knife--"
"She got it out of you?"
"No, she didn't do anything of the sort. It was all me. Like a damn fool I let it out--some'ow."
Nothing could have been more demoralizing than the spectacle of Spinks's face as he delivered himself of his immense confession; so fantastically did it endeavour to chasten rapture with remorse. Rickman controlled himself the better to enjoy it; for Spinks, taken seriously, yielded an inexhaustible vein of purest comedy. "Oh, Spinky," he said with grave reproach, "how could you?"
"Well, I know it was a beastly dishonourable thing to do; but you see I was really most awkwardly situated."
"I daresay you were." It was all very well to laugh; but in spite of his amusement he sympathized with Spinky's delicacy. He also had found himself in awkward situations more than once.
"Still," continued Spinks with extreme dejection, "I can't think how I came to let it out."
That, and the dejection, was too much for Rickman's gravity.
"If you want the truth, Spinky, the pity was you ever kept it in."
And his laughter, held in, piled up, monstrous, insane, ungovernable, broke forth, dispersing the last scruple that clouded the beatitude of Spinks.
Chapter LXV
Often, after half a night spent in a vain striving to shape some immense idea into the form of beauty, be had turned the thing neck and crop out of his mind and gone to sleep on it. Whenever he did this he was sure to wake up and find it there waiting for him, full-formed and perfect as he had dreamed it and desired. It had happened so often that he had grown to trust this profounder inspiration of his sleep.
Hitherto it was only the problems of his heart that had been thus divinely dealt with; he had been left to struggle hopelessly with the problems of his life; and of these Flossie was the most insoluble. And now that he had given up thinking of her, had abandoned her to her own mysterious workings, it too had been solved and in the same simple, inevitable way. His contempt for Flossie's methods could not blind him to the beneficence of the result.
He wrote to her that night to the effect that he gladly and entirely acquiesced in her decision; but that he should have thought that he and not Mr. Spinks had been entitled to the first intimation of it. He had no doubt, however, that she had done the best and wisest thing. He forbore to add "for both of us." His chivalry still persisted in regarding Flossie as a deeply injured person. He had wronged her from the beginning. Had he not laid on her, first the burden of his passion, and yet again the double burden of his genius and his honour? A heavier load, that, and wholly unfitted for the poor little back that would have had to bear it. It never occurred to him that he had been in any way the victim of Flossie's powerful instincts. It was Maddox who said that Mr. Spinks had made himself immortal by his marriage; that he should be put on the Civil List for his services to literature.
Of Rickman's place in literature there could be no question for the next two or three years. He foresaw that the all-important thing was his place on The Planet, his place on Metropolis, his place (if he could find one) on any other paper. He had looked to journalism for the means to support a wife, and journalism alone could maintain him in his struggle with Pilkington. Whether Maddox was right or wrong in his opinion of the disastrous influence of Flossie, there could be no doubt that for the present Rickman's genius had no more formidable rival than his honour. If it is perdition to a great tragic dramatist when passion impels him to marry on three hundred a year, it can hardly be desirable that conscience should constrain him to raise seven hundred and fifty pounds in three years. Fate seemed bent in forcing him to live his tragedies rather than write them; but Rickman, free of Flossie, faced the desperate prospect with the old reckless spirit of his youth.
For the first year the prospect did not look so very desperate. He had found cheap rooms unfurnished in Torrington Square where the houses are smaller and less sumptuous than Mrs. Downey's. He had succeeded in letting the little house in Ealing, where the abominable furniture that had nearly cost so dear justified its existence by adding a small sum to his income. He had benefited indirectly by Rankin's greatness; for Rankin seldom contributed anything to The Planet now beyond his lively column once a week; and Rickman was frequently called on to fill his place. The Planet was good for at least a solid hundred a year; Metropolis (once it began to pay) for a solid two hundred and fifty or more; other papers for small and varying sums. When he totted it all up together he found that he was affluent. He could reckon on a round four hundred all told. In Torrington Square, by the practice of a little ingenious economy, he could easily live on a hundred and twenty-five; so that by the end of the first year he should have saved the considerable sum of two hundred and seventy-five pounds. At that rate, in three years--no, in two years and a--well, in rather more than two and a half years the thing would be done. By a little extra exertion he might be able to reduce it to two years; to one, perhaps, by a magnificent stroke of luck. Such luck, for instance, as a stage success, a run of a hundred nights for the tragedy whose First Act he was writing now.
That, of course, it would be madness to count on; but he had some hopes from the sudden and extraordinary transformation of The Museion.
Sudden enough, to the uninitiated, seeing that in September, ninety-seven, the organ of philosophic criticism to all appearances died, and that in October it burst into life again under a new cover and a new title, Jewdwine himself sounding the trump of resurrection. The Museion's old contributors knew it no more; or failed to recognise it in Metropolis. On the tinted cover there was no trace of the familiar symbolic head-piece, so suggestive of an Ionic frieze, but the new title in the broadest, boldest, blackest of type proclaimed its almost wanton repudiation of the old tradition.
Jewdwine's first "concession to modernity," was a long leading review of the "Art of Herbert Rankin." Herbert Rankin was so much amused with it that it kept him quiet for at least three weeks in his playground of The Planet. After such a handsome appreciation as that, he had to wait a decent interval before "going for Jewdwine." When he remarked to Rickman that it would have been more to the purpose if Jewdwine had devoted his six columns to the Art of S.K.R., Rickman blushed and turned his head away, as if Rankin had been guilty of some gross indelicacy. He was still virginally sensitive where Jewdwine was concerned.
But, in a sense not intended by Rankin, Jewdwine was very much occupied, not to say perturbed by the art of S.K.R. Not exactly to the exclusion of every other interest; for Rickman, looking in on the great editor one afternoon, found him almost enthusiastic over his "last discovery." A new poet, according to Jewdwine, had arisen in the person of an eminent Cabinet Minister, who in ninety-seven was beguiling the tedium of office with a very pretty playing on the pastoral pipe. Mr. Fulcher's In Arcadia lay on the editorial table, bound in white vellum, with the figure of the great God Pan symbolizing Mr. Fulcher, on the cover. Jewdwine's attitude to Mr. Fulcher was for Jewdwine humble, not to say reverent. He intimated to Rickman that in Fulcher he had found what he had wanted.
Jewdwine in the early days of Metropolis wore the hungry look of a man who, having swallowed all his formulas, finds himself unnourished. "The soul," Jewdwine used to say (perverting Emerson) "is appeased by a formula"; and it was clear that his soul would never be appeased until it had found a new one. Those who now conversed intimately with Jewdwine were entertained no longer with the Absolute, but they heard a great deal about the "Return to Nature." Mr. Fulcher's pipings, therefore, were entirely in harmony with Jewdwine's change of mood.
But Rickman, who had once protested so vigorously against the Absolute, would not hear of the Return to Nature, either. That cry was only a symptom of the inevitable sickness of the academic spirit, surfeited with its own philosophy. He shook his head mournfully over Mr. Fulcher. What looked to Jewdwine like simplicity seemed to him only a more intolerably sophisticated pose than any other.
"I prefer Mr. Fulcher in Downing Street to Mr. Fulcher in Arcadia. Mr. Fulcher," he said, "can no more return to Nature than he can enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born."
He walked up and down the little office excitedly, while he drew for Jewdwine's benefit an unattractive picture of the poet as babe, drinking from the breasts of the bounteous mother. "You can't go for ever hanging on your mother's breasts; it isn't decent and it isn't manly. Return to Nature! It's only too easy to return, and stay. You'll do no good at all if you've never been there; but if you mean to grow up you must break loose and get away. The great mother is inclined to bug some of her children rather too tight, I fancy; and by Heaven! it's pretty tough work for some of them wriggling out of her arms."
He came to a sudden standstill, and turned on Jewdwine the sudden leaping light of the blue eyes that seemed to see through Jewdwine and beyond him. No formula could ever frame and hold for him that vision of his calling which had come to him four years ago on Harcombe Hill. He had conceived and sung of Nature, not as the indomitable parent by turns tyrannous and kind, but as the virgin mystery, the shy and tender bride that waits in golden abysmal secrecy for the embrace of spirit, herself athirst for the passionate immortal hour. He foresaw the supreme and indestructible union. He saw one eternal nature and a thousand forms of art, differing according to the virile soul. And what he saw he endeavoured to describe to Jewdwine. "That means, mind you, that your poet is a grown-up man and not a slobbering infant."
"Exactly. And Nature will be the mother of his art, as I said."
"As you didn't say--The mother only. There isn't any immaculate conception of truth. Don't you believe it for a moment."
Jewdwine retired into himself a moment to meditate on that telling word. He wondered what lay beyond it.
"And Art," continued Rickman, "is truth, just because it isn't Nature."
"If you mean," said Jewdwine, seeking a formula, "that modern art is essentially subjective, I agree with you."
"I mean that really virile and original art--the art, I believe of the future--must spring from the supreme surrender of Nature to the human soul."
"And do you honestly believe that the art of the future will be one bit more 'virile' than the art of the present day?"
"On the whole I do."
"Well, I don't. I see nothing that makes for it. No art can hold out for ever against commercialism. The nineteenth century has been commercial enough in all conscience, bestially, brutally commercial; but its commercialism and brutality will be nothing to the commercialism and brutality of the twentieth. If these things are deadly to art now, they'll be ten times more deadly then. The mortality, among poets, my dear Rickman, will be something terrific."
"Not a bit of it. The next century, if I'm not mistaken, will see a pretty big flare up of a revolution; and the soul will come out on top. Robespierre and Martin Luther won't be in it, Jewdwine, with the poets of that school."
"I'm glad you feel able to take that view of it. I don't seem to see the poets of the twentieth century myself."
"I see them all right," said Rickman, simply. "They won't be the poets of Nature, like the nineteenth century chaps; they'll be the poets of human nature--dramatic poets, to a man. Of course, it'll take a revolution to produce that sort."
"A revolution? A cataclysm, you mean."
"No. If you come to think of it, it's only the natural way a healthy poet grows. Look at Shakespeare. I believe, you know, that most poets would grow into dramatic poets if they lived long enough. Only sometimes they don't live; and sometimes they don't grow. Lyric poets are cases of arrested development, that's all."
Jewdwine listened with considerable amusement as his subordinate propounded to him this novel view. He wondered what literary enormity Rickman might be contemplating now. That he had something at the back of his mind was pretty evident. Jewdwine meant to lie low till, from that obscure region, Rickman, as was his wont, should have brought out his monster for inspection.
He produced it the next instant, blushingly, tenderly, yet with no diminution of his sublime belief.
"You see--you'll think it sheer lunacy, but--I've a sort of idea that if I'm to go on at all, myself, it must be on those lines. Modern poetic drama--It's that or nothing, you know."
Jewdwine's face said very plainly that he had no doubt whatever of the alternative. It also expressed a curious and indefinable relief.
"Modern poetic drama? So that's your modest ambition, is it?"
Rickman owned that indeed it was.
"My dear fellow, modern poetic drama is a contradiction in all its terms. There are only three schools of poetry possible--the classic, the romantic and the natural. Art only exists by one of three principles, normal beauty, spiritual spontaneity, and vital mystery or charm. And none of these three is to be found in modern life." These were the laws he had laid down in the Prolegomena to Æsthetics, which Rickman, in the insolence of his genius, had defied. Somehow the life seemed to have departed from those stately propositions, but Jewdwine clung to them in a desperate effort to preserve his critical integrity. He was soothed by the sound of his own voice repeating them. He caught as it were an echo of the majestic harmonies that once floated through his lecture-room at Lazarus. "Besides," he went on, "where will you find your drama to begin with?"
"In modern men and women."
"But modern men and women are essentially undramatic, and unpoetic."
"Still, I must take them, because, you see, there's nothing else to take. There never was or will be. The men and women of Shakespeare's time were modern to him, you know. If they seem poetic to us, that's because a poet made them so; and he made them so because he saw that--essentially--they were so."
Jewdwine pushed out his lips in the manner of one unwillingly dubious.
"My dear Rickman, you have got to learn your limitations; or if not your limitations, the limitations made for you by the ridiculous and unlovely conditions of modern life."
"I have learnt them. After all, what am I to do? I am modern--modern as my hat," said Rickman, turning it in his hands. "I admit that my hat isn't even a fugitive form of the eternal and absolute beauty. It is, I'm afraid, horribly like everybody else's hat. In moments of profound insight I feel that I am horribly like everybody else. If it wasn't for that I should have no hope of achieving my modest ambition."
"I'm not saying anything against your modesty or your ambition. I'm not defying you to write a modern blank verse play; but I defy anybody to act one."
"I know," said Rickman, "it's sad of course, but to the frivolous mind of a critic there always will be something ridiculous in the notion of blank verse spouted on the stage by a person in a frock-coat and a top-hat. But do you think you'd see that frock-coat and top-hat if once the great tragic passions got inside them?"
"Where are the great tragic passions?"
"They exist and are poetic."
"As survivals only. They are poetic but not modern. We have the passions of the divorce-court and the Stock Exchange. They are modern, if you like, but not strikingly poetic."
"Well--even a stock-broker--if you insist on stockbrokers--"
"I don't. Take the people--take the women I know, the women you know. Is there--honestly, is there any poetry in them?"
"There is--heaps. Oceans of poetry--There always has been and will be. It's the poets, the great poets that don't turn up to time."
"Well; I don't care how great a poet you may be. Modern poetic drama is the path of perdition for you. I wish," he added with an unmistakable air of turning to a subject of real interest. "I wish I knew what to do with Fulcher."
"I don't know. I only know Mr. Fulcher's art hasn't much to do with nature. I'm afraid it's the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Fulcher and some young shepherdess of Covent Garden."
"He seems to have proved himself pretty much at home in Arcadia."
"Don't you believe him. He's only at home in Downing Street. You'd better leave him there."
But Jewdwine did not leave him there. He exalted Mr. Fulcher to the seventh heaven in four and a half columns of Metropolis. With his journalistic scent for the alluring and the vivid phrase, he took everything notable that Rickman had said and adapted it to Mr. Fulcher. In Arcadia supplying a really golden opportunity for a critical essay on "Truth to Nature," wherein Mr. Fulcher learnt, to his immense bewilderment, that there is no immaculate conception of that truth; but that to Mr. Fulcher, as poet, belonged the exultation of paternity. Jewdwine quoted Coleridge to the effect that Mr. Fulcher only received what he was pleased to give, and that in Mr. Fulcher's life alone did Nature live. And when Rankin, falling on that article, asked Maddox what it meant, Maddox replied that it meant nothing except that Mr. Fulcher was a Cabinet Minister.
But within three months of the day on which Jewdwine had pronounced the modern poetic drama to be dead, Rickman had written the First Act of his tragedy which proved it (as far as a First Act can prove anything) to be very much alive.
Jewdwine received the announcement of this achievement with every appearance of pleasure. He was indeed genuinely relieved to think that Rickman was thus harmlessly employed. The incessant successful production of Saturnalia would have been prejudicial to the interests of The Museion; a series of triumphant Helens in Leuce would have turned Rickman aside for ever from the columns of Metropolis; but Jewdwine told himself that he had nothing to fear from the rivalries of the modern Tragic Muse. Rickman the journalist would live; for Rickman the poet had set out on the path of perdition.
Nobody could say that it was Jewdwine who had encouraged him to take it.
Chapter LXVI
In January, ninety-eight, Metropolis began to pay, and Rickman's hopes were justified. He was now a solid man, a man of income. For eighteen months he kept strictly within the limits he had allowed himself. His nature inclined him to a riotous and absurd expenditure, and for eighteen months he wrestled with and did violence to his nature. Each sum he saved stood for some triumph of ingenious abnegation, some miracle of self-restraint. And for eighteen months Dicky Pilkington, beholding the spectacle of his heroism, laid ten to one against his ultimate success. The thing, Dicky said, was impossible; he could never keep it up. But Rickman once abandoned to a persistent and passionate economy, there was no more holding him in on that path than on any other. By the middle of the following year, out of an income of four hundred he had saved that sum.
He said to himself that the worst was over now. He had paid off more than half of his debt, and the remainder had still another fourteen months to run. Only fourteen months' passionate economy and the Harden library would be redeemed. As he saw himself within measurable distance of his end, he was seized by an anxiety, an excitement that he had not been aware of at the start. The sight of the goal perturbed him; it suggested the failure that up to that moment he had not allowed himself to contemplate. Like an athlete he gathered himself together for the final spurt; and ninety-nine was a brilliant year for The Planet made glorious by the poems, articles and paragraphs showered on it by S.K.R. Maddox shook his head over some of them; but he took them all and boasted, as he well might, that The Planet published more Rickman--the real Rickman--in six months than Metropolis would do in as many years. He distinguished between Rickman's genius and his talent; provided he got his best work, anybody else was welcome to his second-best. By anybody else he meant Jewdwine.
Yet it was a nobler feeling than professional rivalry that made him abhor the poet's connection with Metropolis; for Maddox was if anything more jealous for Rickman's reputation than for his own. From the very beginning he had never ceased to wonder at his unaccountable affection for Horace Jewdwine; the infatuation, for it amounted to infatuation, would have been comprehensible enough in any other man, but it was unaccountable in Rickman, who was wholly destitute of reverence for the sources of his income. Jewdwine of The Museion had been in Maddox's opinion a harmless philosophic crank; he had done nothing, absolutely nothing for Rickman's genius; but Jewdwine of Metropolis was dangerous, for he encouraged Rickman's talent; and Rickman's talent would, he was afraid, be ultimately destructive to the higher power.
So Maddox prayed to heaven for promotion, that he might make Rickman independent of Jewdwine and his journal. There were many things that he had in his mind to do for him in the day of advancement. His eyes raked the horizon, sighting promotion from afar. And in the last two years, promotion had come very near to Maddox. There were quarters, influential quarters, where he Was spoken of as a singularly original young man; and he had the knack of getting hold of singularly original young men; young men of originality too singular perhaps to make the paper pay. Still, though the orbit of The Planet was hardly so vast as Maddox had anticipated, as to its brilliance there could be no two opinions. In the year ninety-eight, the year that saw Rickman first struggling in the financier's toils, Maddox had delivered his paper from the power of Pilkington. Promotion played with Maddox; it hovered round him, touching him tentatively with the tips of its wings; he lured it by every innocent art within his power, but hitherto it had always settled on some less wild and wanton head.
At last it came, it kept on coming, from a quarter where, as he had every right to look for it, he had of course never dreamed of looking. Rankin's publishers, grown rich on the proceeds of Rankin's pen, were dissatisfied with their reader (the poor man had not discovered Rankin); on Rankin's advice they offered his post to Maddox (who had), and that at double his salary. They grew richer, and at a further hint from Rankin they made Maddox a director. In the same mad year they started a new monthly, and (Rankin again) appointed Maddox as their editor.
His opportunity had come. On the very night of this third appointment Maddox called on Rickman and proposed on behalf of Rankin and Stables to hand over to him the editorship of The Planet. For Stables, he said, was too dog lazy, and Rankin too grossly prosperous to have anything to do with it. He didn't think any of them would ever make a fortune out of it; but its editor's income would be at any rate secure. He omitted to mention that it would be practically secured out of his, Maddox's, own pocket.
"You may reckon," said he, "on three hundred and fifty." He named the sum modestly, humbly almost; not that he thought Rickman would be sorry to have that little addition to his income, but because he was always diffident in offering anything to Rickman, "when you thought of what he was"; and he found something startling, not to say upsetting, in the joy that leapt up in his young eyes. You never could tell how Ricky-ticky would take a thing; but if he had known he was going to take it that way he would have written him a note. He wondered whether Ricky-ticky was in a tight corner, head over ears in debt or love. Did the young lunatic want to marry after that near shave he had two years ago? You wouldn't exactly refuse three hundred and fifty; but a beggar must be brought pretty low to be crumpled up in that way by the mere mention of the sum.
Maddox was not aware that no other combination of figures could have excited precisely those emotions; three hundred and fifty being the exact sum that Rickman needed for the accomplishment of his purpose. It brought his dream nearer to him by a year. A year? Why, it did more. He had only to ask and Maddox would advance the money. His dream was now, this moment, within his grasp.
And all he could say was, "I say, you know, this is awfully good of you."
"Good of you, Rickets, to take the thing off my hands. I can't very well run a monthly and a weekly with all my other jobs thrown in."
"The question is whether I can manage two weeklies and the other things."
"No, you can't. You're not built that way. But if you take The Planet, you can afford to chuck Metropolis. Tell you the truth, that's one reason why I want you to take it."
Some of the joy died out of Rickman's face.
"The other reason is, of course, that I can't think of a better man."
"It's awfully good of you to think of me at all. But why do you want me to chuck Metropolis?"
"Never mind why. I don't say The Planet is the best imaginable place for you, nor are you the best imaginable man for The Planet; but I really can't think of a better."
"No, but why--"
"(Confound him, why can't he leave it alone? I shall lose my temper in another minute," said Maddox to himself.) "The question is, would you like it? Because, if you wouldn't, don't imagine you've got to take it to oblige me."
"Of course I'd like it. There isn't anything I'd like so well."
"It's settled then."
It might have been, but Rickman turned on him again with his ungovernable "Why?"
"If you'd like it, Ricky, there's nothing more to be said. I know it isn't exactly a sumptuous berth for you, but it's a bit better salary."
"I'm not thinking of the salary. Oh, yes, I am, though; God forgive me, I'm thinking of nothing else."
"Salary apart," said Maddox, with the least touch of resentment, "it's a better thing for you to edit The Planet than to sub-edit Metropolis."
"Of course it is. Still, I should like to know why you want me to throw Jewdwine over."
"Hang Jewdwine. I said Metropolis."
"I'm glad you admit the distinction."
"I don't admit it."
"Why do you want me to throw the thing over, then? Do you mean that I can't work for you and Jewdwine at the same time?"
"I never said anything about Jewdwine at all. But--if you will have it--I can't say I consider the connection desirable for the editor of The Planet."
"I think I'm the best judge of that."
"I said--for the editor of The Planet."
"For the editor of The Planet then, why not?"
"Ours is a poor but honest paper," said Maddox with his devilish twinkle.
"I don't see how I can very well be the editor of The Planet so long as it insists on shying a dead cat every week at the editor of Metropolis."
"We have never mentioned the editor of Metropolis. Still--if you can induce Rankin to give up his little jest--the cat is certainly very dead by this time."
"He'll have to give it up if you make me editor."
"You'd better tell him so."
"I shall."
"All right, Rickets; only wait till you are editor. Then you can put as much side on as you like."
"Good heavens, did you ever see me put on side?"
"Well, I've seen you strike an attitude occasionally."
"All my attitudes put together hardly amount to side."
"They do, if they assume that they're going to affect the attitude of our paper."
"I didn't know it had one."
"It has a very decided attitude with regard to the ethics of reviewing; and whatever else you make it give up, it's not going to give up that. The Planet, Ricky, doesn't put on side. Side would be fatal to any freedom in the handling of dead cats. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes its moral being its prime care; but there are some abuses which it lives to expose, though the exposure doesn't help it much to live."
"Oh, I say, Maddy! That's what keeps you going. My poems would have sunk you long ago, if it hadn't been for your thrilling personalities."
"Personalities or no personalities, what I mean to rub into you is that The Planet is impartial; it's the only impartial review in this country. It has always reserved to itself an absolutely untrammelled hand in the shying of dead cats; and because a man happens to be a friend of the editor, it's no guarantee whatever that he won't have one slung at him the minute he deserves it. His only security is to perpetrate some crime so atrocious that we can't publish his name for fear of letting ourselves in for an action for libel. Your attitude to Mr. Jewdwine is naturally personal. Ours is not. I should have thought you'd have been the first to see that."
"I don't see what you've got against him, to begin with. I wish you'd tell me plainly what it is."
"If you will have it, it's simply this--he isn't honest."
"What the devil do you mean?"
"I mean what you mean when you say a woman isn't honest. As you've so often remarked, there's such a thing as intellectual chastity. Some people have it, and some have not. You have it, my dear Rickets, in perfection, not to say excess; but most of us manage to lose it more or less as we go on. It's a deuced hard thing, I can tell you, for any editor to keep; and Jewdwine, I'm afraid, has latterly been induced to part with it to a considerable, a very considerable extent. It's a thousand pities; for Jewdwine had the makings in him of a really fine critic. He might have been a classic if he'd died soon enough."
"He is a classic--he's the only man whose opinion's really worth having at this moment."
"Whom are we talking about? Jewdwine? Or the editor of Metropolis?"
"I'm talking about Jewdwine. I happen to know him, if you don't."
"And I'm talking about the other fellow whom you don't happen to know a little bit. Nobody cares a tuppenny damn about his opinion, except the fools who read it and the knaves who buy it."
"And who do you imagine those people are?"
"Most of them are publishers, I believe. But a good few are authors, I regret to say."
"Authors have cheek enough for most things; but I should like to see one suggesting to Jewdwine that he should sell him his opinion."
"My dear fellow, anybody may suggest it. That's what he's there for, since he turned his opinion on to the streets. Whether you get a pretty opinion or not depends on the length of your purse."
"Why don't you call it bribery at once?"
"Because bribery's too harsh a term to apply to an editor, mon semblable, mon frère; but in a woman, or a parliamentary candidate, it might possibly be called corruption."
"Thanks. Well, you've made me a very generous offer, Maddox, so generous that I'm glad you've explained yourself before I took it. For after that, you know, it would have been rather awkward for me to have to tell you you're a liar!"
"You consider me a liar, do you?" said Maddox in a mild dispassionate voice.
"Certainly I do, when you say these thing about Jewdwine."
"How about Rankin? He says them."
"Then Rankin's a liar, too!"
"And Stables?"
"And Stables--if he says them."
"My dear Rickman, everybody says them; only they don't say them to you. We can't all be liars."
"There's a difference, I admit. Anybody who says them is a liar; and anybody who says them to me is a d----d liar! That's the difference."
Whereupon Maddox intimated (as honour indeed compelled him) that Rickman was the sort of young fool for which there is no salvation. And by the time Rickman had replied with suitable hyperbole; and Maddox, because of the great love he bore to Rickman, had observed that if Rickman chose to cut his confused throat he might do so without its being a matter of permanent regret to Maddox; and Rickman, because of the great love he bore to Maddox, had suggested his immediate departure for perdition, it was pretty clearly understood that Rickman himself preferred to perish, everlastingly perish, rather than be connected even remotely with Maddox and his paper. And on that understanding they separated.
And when the door was closed between them, Rickman realised that his folly was even as Maddox had described it. In one night, and at a crisis of his finances, he had severed himself from a fairly permanent source of income; flung up the most desirable chance that had presented itself hitherto in his career; and quarrelled disgracefully and disagreeably with his best friend. He supposed the split was bound to come; but if he could only have staved it off for another year, till he had collected that seven hundred and fifty! There could be no doubt that that was what he ought to have done. He ought to have been prudent for Lucia's sake. And on the top of it all came the terrible reflection--Was it really worth it? Did he really believe in Jewdwine? Or had he sacrificed himself for an idea?
Chapter LXVII
Rickman could never be made to speak of the quarrel with Maddox. He merely mentioned to Jewdwine in the most casual manner that he had left The Planet. As for his grounds for that abrupt departure Jewdwine was entirely in the dark. It was Lucia that enlightened him.
For all things, even the deep things of journalism, sooner or later come to light. Rickman, before the quarrel, had given Miss Roots an introduction to the young men of The Planet, and its editor had taken kindly to Miss Roots. Maddox, it is true, did his best to keep the matter quiet, until in a moment of expansion he allowed that shrewd lady to lure him into confidences. Maddox tried to take it and present it philosophically. "It was bound to happen," he said. "Our Ricky-ticky is a bad hand at serving two masters," but as to which was God and which Mammon in this connection he modestly reserved his opinion. Jewdwine's name was carefully avoided, but Miss Roots was left in no doubt as to the subject of dispute.
She and Maddox were one in their inextinguishable enthusiasm for their Rickman, for Rickman had the gift, the rarest of all gifts, of uniting the hearts that loved him. If Jewdwine had showed anything like a proper appreciation of the poet, Maddox would have spared him now. So the two looked at each other, with eyes that plumbed all the depths of the unspoken and unspeakable, eyes that sent out a twinkling flash of admiration as they agreed that it was "just like Rickman." That phrase was for ever on the lips of his admirers, a testimony to the fact that Rickman was invariably true to himself.
He was being true to himself now in being true to Jewdwine, and it was in that form that the tale went round. "I can't tell you all the ins and outs of it," wrote Miss Roots to Lucia, "but he is paying for his loyalty to Mr. Jewdwine;" and Lucia, with equal pride in her cousin and her friend, repeated it to Kitty Palliser, who repeated it to somebody else with the comment, "I'm not surprised to hear it"; and somebody else repeated it in a good many quarters without any comment at all. For everybody but Lucia understood that it spoke for itself.
And nobody understood it better than Jewdwine when his cousin said, "You will be nice to him, Horace, won't you? He is suffering for his loyalty to you." Lucia herself had adopted a theory which she now set forth (reluctantly, by reason of the horrible light it threw on human nature). Mr. Maddox (whoever he might be) was of course jealous of Horace. It was a shocking theory, but it was the only one which made these complications clear to her.
But Jewdwine had no need of theories or explanations. He understood. He knew that a certain prejudice, not to say suspicion, attached to him. Ideas, not very favourable to his character as a journalist, were in the air. And as his mind (in this respect constitutionally susceptible) had seldom been able to resist ideas in the air there were moments when his own judgment wavered. He was beginning to suspect himself.
He was not sure, and if he had been he would not have acted on that certainty; for he had never possessed the courage of his opinions. But it had come to this, that Jewdwine, the pure, the incorruptible, was actually uncertain whether he had or had not taken a bribe. As he lay awake in bed at four o'clock in the morning his conscience would suggest to him that he had done this thing; but at noon, in the office of Metropolis, his robust common sense, then like the sun, in the ascendant, boldly protested that he had done nothing of the sort. He had merely made certain not very unusual concessions to the interests of his journal. In doing so he had of course set aside his artistic conscience, an artistic conscience being a private luxury incompatible with the workings of a large corporate concern. He was bound to disregard it in loyalty to his employers and his public. They expected certain things of him and not others. It was different in the unexciting days of the old Museion; it would be different now if he could afford to run a paper of his own dedicated to the service of the Absolute. But Jewdwine was no longer the servant of the Absolute. He was the servant and the mouthpiece of a policy that in his heart he abhorred; irretrievably committed to a programme that was concerned with no absolute beyond the absolute necessity of increasing the circulation of Metropolis. Such a journal only existed on the assumption that its working expenses were covered by the advertisements of certain publishing houses. But if this necessity committed him to a more courteous attitude than he might otherwise have adopted towards the works issued by those houses, that was not saying that he was in their pay. He was, of course, in the pay of his own publishers, but so was every man who drew a salary under the same conditions; and if those gentlemen, finding their editor an even more competent person than they had at first perceived, were in the habit of increasing his salary in proportion to his competence, that was only the very correct and natural expression of their good opinion.
Whatever he had thought of himself at four o'clock in the morning, by four o'clock in the afternoon Jewdwine took an extremely lenient, not to say favourable view. Unfortunately he had not the courage of that opinion either. Therefore he was profoundly touched by this final instance of Rickman's devotion, and all that it argued of reckless and inspired belief. In the six months that followed he saw more of Rickman than he had seen in as many years. Whenever he had a slack evening he would ask him to dinner, and let him sit talking on far into the night. He was afraid of being left alone with that uncomfortable doubt, that torturing suspicion. Rickman brought with him an atmosphere charged with stimulating conviction, and in his presence Jewdwine breathed freely and unafraid. He felt himself no longer the ambiguous Jewdwine that he was, but the noble incorruptible Jewdwine that he had been. Up there in the privacy of his study Jewdwine let himself go; to that listener he was free to speak as a critic noble and incorruptible. But there were moments, painful for both men, when he would pause, gripped by his doubt, in the full swing of some high deliverance; when he looked at Rickman with a pathetic anxious gaze, as if uncertain whether he were not presuming too far on a character that he held only at the mercy of his friend's belief.
Though as yet he was not fully aware of the extent to which he relied on that belief, there could hardly have been a stronger tie than that which now bound him to his subordinate. He would have shrunk from loosing it lest he should cut himself off from some pure source of immortality, lest he should break the last link between his soul and the sustaining and divine reality. It was as if through Rickman he remained attached to the beauty which he still loved and to the truth which he still darkly discerned.
In any case he could not have suffered him to go unrewarded. He owed that to himself, to the queer personal decency which he still managed to preserve after all his flounderings in the slough of journalism. It was intolerable to his pride that Rickman should be in any pecuniary embarrassment through his uncompromising devotion. He hardly knew whether he was the more pleased because Rickman had stuck to him or because he had thrown his other friends over. He had never quite forgiven him that divided fealty. He cared nothing for an allegiance that he had had to share with Maddox and his gang. But now that Rickman was once more exclusively, indisputably his, he was in honour bound to cherish and protect him. (Jewdwine was frequently visited by these wakenings of the feudal instinct that slept secretly in his blood.) If he could not make up to Rickman for the loss of the proposed editorship, he saw to it that he was kept well supplied with lucrative work on his own paper. As an even stronger proof of his esteem he allowed him for the first time a certain authority, and an unfettered hand.
For six months Rickman luxuriated in power and increase of leisure and of pay. If the pay was insufficient to cover all his losses the leisure was invaluable; it enabled him to get on with his tragedy.
Now if Rickman had been prudent he would have finished his tragedy then and there and got it published in all haste. For there is no doubt that if any work of his had been given to the world any time within those six months, Jewdwine would have declared the faith that was in him. Whatever the merits of the work he would have celebrated its appearance by a sounding Feast of Trumpets in Metropolis. He would have done anything to strengthen the tie that attached him to the sources of his spiritual content. But Rickman was not prudent. He let the golden hours slip by while he sat polishing up his blank verse as if he had all eternity before him.
Meanwhile he did all he could for Jewdwine. Jewdwine indeed could not have done a better thing for himself than in giving Rickman that free hand. In six months there was a marked improvement in the tone of Metropolis and the reputation of its editor, and, but for the unexpected which is always happening, Jewdwine might in the long run have emerged without a stain.
Nothing in fact could have been more utterly unforeseen, and yet, in reviewing all the steps which led to the ultimate catastrophe, Rickman said to himself that nothing would have been more consistent and inevitable. It came about first of all through a freak, a wanton freak of Fate in the form of a beardless poet, a discovery, not of Jewdwine's nor of Rickman's but of Miss Roots'. That Miss Roots could make a discovery clearly indicated the finger of fate. Miss Roots promptly asked Rickman to dinner and presented to him the discovery, beardless, breathless also and hectic, wearing an unclean shirt and a suit of frayed shoddy.
He came away from that dinner, that embarrassing, palpitating encounter, with a slender sheaf of verses in his pocket. It did not take him long to read them, nor to see (the unforeseen again!) that the verses would live longer than their maker. They were beardless, breathless, and hectic like the boy, but nobody could have been keener than Rickman to recognize the immortal adolescence, the swift panting of the pursuing god, the burning of the inextinguishable flame. He wrote a letter to him, several letters, out of the fulness of his heart. Then Maddox, to whom he had not spoken since the day of their falling out, came up to him at the Junior Journalists, shook his hand as if nothing had happened, and thanked him for his appreciation of young Paterson. He said that it had put new life into the boy. They made it up over young Paterson. And that was another step towards the inevitable conclusion.
The next step was that somebody who was paying for the boy's doctor's bills paid also for the publication of his poems. They arrived (this of course was only to be expected) at the office of Metropolis (the slender sheaf grown slenderer by some omissions which Rickman had advised). But it was Fate that contrived that they should arrive in the same week with a volume (by no means slender), a volume of Poems issued by the publishers of Metropolis and written by a friend (and an influential friend) of the editor. Therein were the last sweet pipings of the pastoral Fulcher. No other hand but Jewdwine's, as Jewdwine sorrowfully owned, could have done anything for this work, and he meant to have devoted a flattering article to it in the next number. But in the arrangements of the unforeseen it was further provided that Jewdwine should be disabled, at what he playfully called the "critical moment," by an attack of influenza. The two volumes, the slender and the stout, were forwarded to Rickman in the same parcel, and Jewdwine in a note discreetly worded threw himself and the poems of his influential friend on Rickman's mercy. Would Rickman deal with the big book? He would see for himself that it was a big book. He gave him as usual a perfectly free hand as to space, but he thought it might be well to mention that the book was to have had a two-page article all to itself. He drew Rickman's attention to the fact that it was published by So and So, and hoped that he might for once at least rely on his discretion. Perhaps as he was reviewing the work of a "brother bard" it would be better to keep the article anonymous.
There was nothing coarse about Jewdwine's methods. Through all his career he remained refined and fastidious, and his natural instincts forbade him to give a stronger hint. Unfortunately, in this instance, refinement had led him into a certain ambiguity of phrase!
On this ambiguity Rickman leapt, with a grin of diabolical delight. He may have had some dim idea that it would be his shelter in the day of rebuke; but all he could clearly think of as he held the boy's frail palpitating volume in his hand, was that he had but that moment in which to praise him. This was his unique and perfect opportunity, the only sort of opportunity that he was not likely to let slip.
Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat; and it really looked as if madness had come upon Rickman in the loneliness and intoxication of his power. With those two volumes of poetry before him, a small one by a rank outsider, unknown, unkempt and unprotected; a boy from whom no more was to be expected, seeing that he was about to depart out of the world where editors are powerful; and one, a large, considerable volume by a person eminent already in that world and with many years of poetry and influence before him, he gave (reckless of all proportion) the two-page article to the slender volume and the paragraph to the stout. That was what he did--he, the sub-editor.
Of the paragraph the less said the better. As for the article it was such a song of jubilation as one poet sings over the genius of another; and nothing that he had ever done for Metropolis delighted him so much as the making of it. He sent the proofs to Jewdwine as usual with a note. "Here they are. I think I've been discreet. I've done what I could for Mr. Fulcher, but, as you'll see, I've dealt nobly with young Paterson, as he deserves." As he heard nothing from Jewdwine, he could only suppose that the chief was satisfied, and he could not help reflecting with some complacency that no doubt old Maddox would be satisfied too.
The next thing that happened was that he was cut by Maddox at the Junior Journalists. (It was on a Saturday, and Metropolis, the number, had appeared the night before). Cut unmistakably, with a thrust from the blue eyes and an expressive turning of the enormous shoulders. A number once issued from his hands Rickman never looked at it again if he could help it, and he never troubled to look at it now. He simply regarded Maddox's behaviour as unaccountable. In the hope of lighting on some explanation he called at Tavistock Place one Sunday afternoon, at a time when he was pretty sure of finding Miss Roots alone. He wanted to know, he said, what was the matter with Maddy. Apparently Miss Roots had something the matter with her too, for her only answer was to hand him stiffly a copy of Metropolis with the pages scored in blue pencil at his own article. He took it with a radiant and confiding smile, a smile that assumed such a thoroughly delightful understanding between him and Miss Roots that the little lady, who had evidently counted on a very different effect, was put to some intellectual confusion. She noticed that as he read the smile vanished and gave place, first to an expression of absolute bewilderment, and then to a furious flush, whether of shame or indignation she could not tell, but it looked (again to her confusion) uncommonly like both.
"I see," he said quietly, and laid the paper aside.
What he had seen was that, save for a few ingenious transpositions, the two reviews stood very much as he had written them. The only striking alteration was that Mr. Fulcher had got the article and young Paterson the paragraph.
"Oh, you see, do you?" said Miss Roots bitterly. "That's more than I do."
"I see there's been some astonishing mistake." For one moment he exonerated Jewdwine and embraced the wild hypothesis of a printer's error. He took back the accursed journal; as he held it his hand trembled uncontrollably. He glanced over the notices again. No. It was not after this fashion that the printers of the Metropolis were wont to err. He recognized the familiar hand of the censor, though it had never before accomplished such an incredible piece of editing as this.
And yet it was in strict accordance with the old tradition. The staff of Metropolis knew that before a line of theirs was printed it had to pass under their editor's reforming hand; that was the understood condition on which they wrote for him at all; it was the method by which Jewdwine maintained the unity of his empire. But in the case of Rickman he either forbore to exercise his privilege, or exercised it in such a manner as preserved the individuality of the poet's style. Like some imperial conqueror Jewdwine had absorbed the literary spirit of the man he conquered, and Metropolis bore the stamp of Rickman for all time. So now the style of the articles remained intact; they might have passed equally for the work of Rickman or of Jewdwine.
"I suppose," he said helplessly, "it is a little short."
"Short? You weren't bound to make it long; but there was no occasion to be so contemptuous."
"Contemptuous? Good God!"
"That's what it amounts to when you're so insufferably polite."
Oh yes he recognized it, the diabolical urbanity that had seemed the very choicest method of dealing with Mr. Fulcher.
"Politeness was not exactly all you led us to expect from you."
He passed his hand wearily over his forehead and his eyes. Miss Roots had a moment of compunction. She thought of all that he had done for her. He had delivered her from her labours in the Museum; he had introduced her to the young men of The Planet, and had made Maddox send her many books to review; he had lifted her from the obscurity that threatened to engulf her. And he had done more for her than this. He had given her back her youth and intellect; he had made her life a joy instead of a terror to her. But Miss Roots was just. The agony on his face would have melted her heart, but for another agony that she saw.
"If the poor boy knew that you had written that paragraph--"
"He needn't know unless some kind friend goes and tells him. It isn't signed."
"No. I don't wonder that you were ashamed to put your name to it."
He rose to go. She looked up at him with a queer little look, half penetrating and half pleading, and held out her hand.
"Well," she said, "what am I to say if he asks me if you wrote it? Can you deny it?"
"No," he said curtly, "I can't deny it."
"And you can't explain it?"
"No, and I can't explain it. Surely," he said with a horrible attempt at laughter, "it speaks for itself."
"It does indeed, Keith."
And Maddox, to whom Miss Roots related the substance of that interview, echoed her sentiment.
"It does indeed."
Of all that brilliant band of young men lured by journalism to ruin they looked on their Rickman as the most splendid, the most tragic.